Related papers: Human Extinction A Demographic Perspective
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…
The possibility of spreading by migration, colonizing new spatial domains suitable for development and reproduction, can substantially relieve a biological population from the risk of extinction. By means of a realistic computational model…
We study the interplay between synchronization and extinction of a species. Using a general model we show that under a common external forcing, the species with a quadratic saturation term in the population dynamics first undergoes spatial…
The Sapient Paradox is the apparently unexplainable time delay of several ten thousand years following the arrival of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe and before the introduction of impressive innovations with the agricultural revolution.…
We consider a simple-model population, whose individuals react with a certain delay to temporal variations of their habitat. We investigate the impact of such a delayed-answer on the survival chances of the population, both in a…
We introduce a new model for large scale evolution and extinction in which species are organized into food chains. The system evolves by two processes: origination/speciation and extinction. In the model, extinction of a given species can…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution through mutation and natural selection of a population that evolves on a $\bbT_d^+$ tree. We think of this model as a way of describing the evolution fitness landscape of a population. We obtain…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
We propose the following model for speciation and extinction. Birth and deaths occur according to spatially inhomogeneous contact rates. We assume that the ratio of the birth rate over the death rate at a site converges to some limit as the…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
A simple stochastic model for evolution, based upon the need to pass a sequence of n critical steps (Carter 1983, Watson 2008) is applied to both terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. In the former case, the time at which humans…
The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two…
Dynamical mechanisms that can stabilize the coexistence or diversity in biology are generally of fundamental interest. In contrast to many two-strategy evolutionary games, games with three strategies and cyclic dominance like the…
Population decline is projected to become widespread in Europe, with the continental population set to reverse its longstanding trajectory of growth within the next five years. This represents unfamiliar demographic territory. Despite this,…
This paper studies the distribution function of the time of extinction of a subcritical epidemic, when a large enough proportion of the population has been immunized and/or the infectivity of the infectious individuals has been reduced, so…
We find that the hypothesis made by Jan, Stauffer and Moseley [Theory in Biosc., 119, 166 (2000)] for the evolution of sex, namely a strategy devised to escape extinction due to too many deleterious mutations, is sufficient but not…
The study considers the model of an abstract organism, called Arbitrary Oscillator (ArbO), which is capable of making decisions at each timed step. These decisions are 'critical' since, randomly, their outcome can be 'fatal' for ArbO, thus…
The current understanding of supernova and gamma-ray burst events suggests important effects on the biosphere if one of more of them happened to strike the earth in the past. In this paper we evaluate the possibility that life extinctions…
Recently it was found, in a broad class of models, that the dark energy density may change its sign during the evolution of the universe. This may lead to a global collapse of the universe within the time t_c ~ 10^{10}-10^{11} years. Our…
We study continuous-time birth-death type processes, where individuals have independent and identically distributed lifetimes, according to a random variable Q, with E[Q]=1, and where the birth rate if the population is currently in state…