Friday, June 6, 2008

Demographic Growth: The Basics

John Hawks over at the University of Wisconsin, Madison posted a piece that caught my eye on the basics of demographic growth.

In it he reviews the basics of growth: linear versus geometric and instantaneous growth, and what that means for models of human population growth. He writes:
You get the idea: this bank problem is very much like our problem reconstructing ancient demography in human populations. When we consider genetic variation, what we observe in today's genes was affected not only by the population sizes at the signposts that we observed in the past, but by every point in between.


http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/evolution/demography/voight-demographic-exponential-2008.html?seemore=y
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Citations

Brown, PR (1999). Rate of increase as a function of rainfall for house mouse Mus domesticus populations in a cereal-growing region in southern Australia. Journal of Applied Ecology, 36, 4.

Mathews, F. (2008). You are what your mother eats: evidence for maternal preconception diet influencing foetal sex in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Meadows, et al (2004) "Limits of Growth: the 30-Year Update." Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, VT.

Ylönen, H (2003). Is reproduction of the Australian house mouse (mus domesticus) constrained by food? A large-scale field experiment. Oecologia, 135, 3

For video of the mouse infestation, visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LMxhc8WwGU

Wells and Stock (2007)“The Biology of the Colonizing Ape” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 50: 191.