相关论文: Too Soon for Doom Gloom?

Demographic data and recent experiments verify earlier predictions that mortality has short (few percent of the life span) memory of the previous life history, may be significantly decreased, reset to its value at a much younger age, and…

This note presents a minimal approach to the origin of life, following standard ideas. We pay special attention to the point of view of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and in particular to detailed balance. As a consequence we…

Studies that predict species extinction have focused on a range of flora and fauna but in regard to Homo sapiens there are, with one notable exception, no predictive studies, only considerations of possible ways this may occur. The…

The existence of intelligent, interstellar traveling and colonising life is a key assumption behind the Fermi Paradox. Until recently, detecting signs of life elsewhere has been so technically challenging as to seem almost impossible.…

In a language corpus, the probability that a word occurs $n$ times is often proportional to $1/n^2$. Assigning rank, $s$, to words according to their abundance, $\log s$ vs $\log n$ typically has a slope of minus one. That simple Zipf's law…

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 the crowding of near-extreme events in the time gaps between successive finishers in major international marathons. Naively, one might expect these gaps to become progressively larger for better-placing finishers. While such an…

We propose a novel approach for estimating mean survival time in the presence of censored data, in which we divide the population under study into survival-ordered fractions defined by a set of proportions, and compute the mean survival…

Starting with a likelihood or preference order on worlds, we extend it to a likelihood ordering on sets of worlds in a natural way, and examine the resulting logic. Lewis earlier considered such a notion of relative likelihood in the…

Conditions for almost sure extinction are studied in discrete time branching processes with an infinite number of types. It is not assumed that the expected number of children is a bounded function of the parent's type. There might also be…

Why do human populations remain vulnerable to collapse, even when they are large? Classical demographic theory predicts that volatility in growth should decline rapidly with size due to the averaging effects of the law of large numbers. As…

This note introduces the concept of a partially specified prior distribution for certain post hoc inference problems, where a finite population is sampled once in order to make a decision on the presence or complete absence of some…

Let $N$ be a natural number. We consider a population which lives on $I_N=\{-N,-N+1,\dots,N-1,N\}$. Each individual gives birth at rate $\lambda$ on each of its neighboring sites and dies at rate 1. No births are allowed from the inside of…

While LLMs have seen substantial improvement in reasoning capabilities, they also sometimes overthink, generating unnecessary reasoning steps, particularly under uncertainty, given ill-posed or ambiguous queries. We introduce statistically…

We review the statistical properties of the genealogies of a few models of evolution. In the asexual case, selection leads to coalescence times which grow logarithmically with the size of the population in contrast with the linear growth of…

Longevity of a taxonomic group is an important issue in understanding the dynamics of evolution. In this respect a key observation is that genera, families or orders can each be assigned a characteristic average lifetime [Van Valen, L.,…

This article deals with the emergence of a specific mating preference pattern called homogamy in a population. Individuals are characterized by their genotype at two haploid loci, and the population dynamics is modelled by a non-linear…

Human reasoning often involves working over limited information to arrive at probabilistic conclusions. In its simplest form, this involves making an inference that is not strictly entailed by a premise, but rather only likely given the…

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,…

A simple weakly frequency dependent model for the dynamics of a population with a finite number of types is proposed, based upon an advantage of being rare. In the infinite population limit, this model gives rise to a non-smooth dynamical…