Related papers: Universal Mortality Law, Life Expectancy and Immor…
Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on assumptions of spatial averaging, hold that natural selection cannot favor shorter lifespan without direct compensating benefit to individual reproductive success.…
Shepard's universal law of generalization is a remarkable hypothesis about how intelligent organisms should perceive similarity. In its broadest form, the universal law states that the level of perceived similarity between a pair of stimuli…
We use a combination of extreme value theory, survival analysis and computer-intensive methods to analyze the mortality of Italian and French semi-supercentenarians for whom there are validated records. After accounting for the effects of…
Metabolic energy consumption has long been thought to play a major role in the aging process ({\it 1}). Across species, a gram of tissue on average expends about the same amount of energy during life-span ({\it 2}). Energy restriction has…
Correlations between high life expectancy and low lifespan inequality are frequently observed. A recent article seeks to explain this phenomenon by proposing that a mortality improvement maps to life expectancy and relative lifespan…
Ignoring the differences between countries, human reproductive and dispersal behaviors can be described by some standardized models, so whether there is a universal law of population growth hidden in the abundant and unstructured data from…
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…
The existing life table method needs to calculate the age-specific mortality first, not only has too many and complicated calculation steps, but also introduces the multiple approximation to bring error. This paper redefines the probability…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
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…
Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary…
Weak selection, which means a phenotype is slightly advantageous over another, is an important limiting case in evolutionary biology. Recently it has been introduced into evolutionary game theory. In evolutionary game dynamics, the…
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.…
There is sustained and widespread interest in understanding the limit, if any, to the human lifespan. Apart from its intrinsic and biological interest, changes in survival in old age have implications for the sustainability of social…
The unreduced, universally nonperturbative analysis of arbitrary interaction process, described by a quite general equation, provides the truly complete, "dynamically multivalued" general solution that leads to dynamically derived,…
Mortality displacement is the concept that deaths are moved forward in time (e.g., a few days, several months, and years) by exposure from when they would occur without the exposure, which is common in environmental time-series studies.…
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…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…