Related papers: Why humans die -- an unsolved biological problem
General functions for human survival and mortality may support a possibility of general mechanisms in human ageing. We discovered that the survival and mortality curves could be described very simply and accurately by the Weibull survival…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
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…
In this paper, we affirm our earlier findings of evidence for a limit to human lifespan. In particular, we assess the analyses in extreme value theory (EVT) performed by Rootz\'en and Zholud. We find that their criticisms of our work are…
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…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
We pursue research leading towards the nature of causality in the universe. We establish the equation of the universe's evolution from the universe-state function and its series expansion, in which causes and effects connect together to…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
Infant deaths and old age deaths are very different. The former are mostly due to severe congenital malformations of one or a small number of specific organs. On the contrary, old age deaths are largely the outcome of a long process of…
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 doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive…
This paper addresses the theoretical conditions necessary for some subject of study to survive forever. A probabilistic analysis leads to some prerequisite conditions for preserving, say, electronic data indefinitely into the future. The…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
We advance a famous principle - causality principle - but under a new view. This principle is a principium automatically leading to most fundamental laws of the nature. It is the inner origin of variation, rules evolutionary processes of…
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in various contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the dynamics of survival analysis,…
Many theories have been proposed to answer two questions on aging: "Why do we age?" and "How do we age?" Among them, evolutionary theories are proposed to interpret the evolutionary advantage of aging, and "saving resources for group…
Recent discoveries show steady improvements in life expectancy during modern decades. Does this support that humans continue to live longer in future? We recently put forward the maximum survival tendency, as found in survival curves of…
If evolution can be connected to the principle of least action, and if it is depicted in evolution space versus time then it corresponds to the direction of ultimate causation. As an organism evolves and follows a path of proximate…
The controversy concerning both the definition of the species and methods for inferring the boundaries and numbers of species has occupied biologists for centuries, and the debate itself has become known as the species problem. The modern…
In this paper, we make a review on the concepts of rationality across several different fields, namely in economics, psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology. We review how processes like natural selection can help us…