Related papers: Resource Abundance and Life Expectancy
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
In this working paper, I developed a suite of macroeconomic models that shed light on the intricate relationship between economic development, health, and fertility. These innovative models conceptualize health as an intermediate good,…
Does bearing children shorten a woman's life expectancy? Several demographic studies, historic and current, have found no such effect. But the Caerphilly cohort study is far the most prominent and frequently-cited, and it answers in the…
Components in many real-world complex systems depend on each other for the resources required for survival, and may die of a shortage. These patterns of dependencies often take the form of a complex network whose structure potentially…
Since the 1940s, population projections have in most cases been produced using the deterministic cohort component method. However, in 2015, for the first time, in a major advance, the United Nations issued official probabilistic population…
This paper presents a semi-quantitative mathematical model of the changes over time in the statistical distribution of well-being of individuals in a society. The model predicts that when individuals overvalue the more socially conspicuous…
Natural selection has produced an extraordinary diversity of life histories spanning many orders of magnitude in body size, vital rates, and biological times. In general, big and cold organisms grow and reproduce slowly and live long lives;…
Existing theories for the evolution of aging and death treat senescence as a side-effect of strong selection for fertility. These theories are well-developed mathematically, but fit poorly with emerging experimental data. The data suggest…
The spatial dispersal of individuals is known to play an important role in the dynamics of populations, and is central to metapopulation theory. At the same time, local adaptation to environmental conditions creates a geographic mosaic of…
Human population is at the centre of research on global environmental change. On the one hand, population dynamics influence the environment and the global climate system through consumption-based carbon emissions. On the other hand, health…
Within the next few years, the first Earth-mass planets will be discovered around other stars. Some of those worlds will certainly lie within the classical "habitable zone" of their parent stars, and we will quickly move from knowing of no…
We are increasingly using nature for tourism and recreation, an economic sector now generating more than 10% of the global GDP and 10% of global total employment. This growth though has come at a cost and we now have 5930 species for which…
Using the economic complexity methodology on data for disease prevalence in 195 countries during the period of 1990-2016, we propose two new metrics for quantifying the relatedness between diseases, or the `disease space' of countries. With…
This paper is part of the Global Income Dynamics Project cross-country comparison of earnings inequality, volatility, and mobility. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure…
The original version of Bayesian reconstruction, a method for estimating age-specific fertility, mortality, migration and population counts of the recent past with uncertainty, produced estimates for female-only populations. Here we show…
The tragedy of the commons (TOC) is a ubiquitous social dilemma witnessed in interactions between a population of living entities and shared resources available to them: The individuals in the population tend to selfishly overexploit a…
Many species live in colonies that prosper for a while and then collapse. After the collapse the colony survivors disperse randomly and found new colonies that may or may not make it depending on the new environment they find. We use birth…
In order to understand the phenomenon of longevity in biological world, the relationship between the potential of longevity and the structural complexity of an organism is analyzed. I. The potential of longevity is the maximum lifespan of…
Organisms shape their own environment, which in turn affects their survival. This feedback becomes especially important for communities containing a large number of species; however, few existing approaches allow studying this regime,…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…