Related papers: Human Extinction A Demographic Perspective
Given that extinction in a bisexual population is certain, we study a way to approximate the time when this extinction occurs. Our study is based on standard tools from Extreme Value Theory, which in practice are very easy to implement. We…
Are there limits to human longevity? We suggest a new demographic model to describe human demographic trajectories. Specifically, the model mathematically defines the limits of longevity. Through the demographic analysis of trends for…
Does the human lifespan have an impenetrable biological upper limit which ultimately will stop further increase in life lengths? This question is important for understanding aging, and for society, and has led to intense controversies.…
Growth in the global human population this century will have momentous consequences for societies and the environment. Population growth has come with higher aggregate human welfare, but also climate change and biodiversity loss. Based on…
Sexually reproducing populations with small number of individuals may go extinct by stochastic fluctuations in sex determination, causing all their members to become male or female in a generation. In this work we calculate the time to…
In the long run, the eventual extinction of any biological population is an inevitable outcome. While extensive research has focused on the average time it takes for a population to go extinct under various circumstances, there has been…
Humanity's path to avoiding extinction is a daunting and inevitable challenge which proves difficult to solve, partially due to the lack of data and evidence surrounding the concept. We aim to address this confusion by addressing the most…
We consider the effect of non-constant parameters on the human-forest interaction logistic model coupled with human technological growth introduced in "Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis"[1]. In…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
The Anthropocene is a proposed time subdivision of the earth's history correlated to the strong human perturbation of the ecosystem. Much debate is ongoing about what date should be considered as the start of the Anthropocene, but much less…
Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
Populations are often subject to catastrophes that cause mass removal of individuals. Many stochastic growth models have been considered to explain such dynamics. Among the results reported, it has been considered whether dispersion…
Consider a population whose size changes stepwise by its members reproducing or dying (disappearing), but is otherwise quite general. Denote the initial (non-random) size by $Z_0$ and the size of the $n$th change by $C_n$, $n= 1, 2,…
Time-dependent distribution of the global extinction of megafauna is compared with the growth of human population. There is no correlation between the two processes. Furthermore, the size of human population and its growth rate were far too…
The fitness of a biological strategy is typically measured by its expected reproductive rate, the first moment of its offspring distribution. However, strategies with high expected rates can also have high probabilities of extinction. A…
Extinction of a long-lived isolated stochastic population can be described as an exponentially slow decay of quasi-stationary probability distribution of the population size. We address extinction of a population in a two-population system…
The question of whether a population will persist or go extinct is of key interest throughout ecology and biology. Various mathematical techniques allow us to generate knowledge regarding individual behaviour, which can be analysed to…
Gompertz's law tells us that for humans above the age of 35 the death rate increases exponentially with a doubling time of about 10 years. Here, we show that the same law continues to hold even for ages over 100. Beyond 106 there is so far…
A simulation model of a population having internal (genetic) structure is presented. The population is subject to selection pressure coming from the environment which is the same in the whole system but changes in time. Reproduction has a…