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Thomas Robert Malthus, after whom Malthusianism is named. Malthusianism is a theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline.
The neo-Malthusian controversy, comprising related debates of many years later, has seen a similar central role assigned to the numbers of children born. [27] The goal of Malthusian theory is to explain how population and food production expand, with the latter experiencing arithmetic growth and the former experiencing exponential growth. [28]
Huxley recognized that unlike the earlier transmutational ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Darwin's theory provided a mechanism for evolution without supernatural involvement, even if Huxley himself was not completely convinced that natural selection was the key evolutionary mechanism.
Using Malthus's idea of the struggle for existence, Darwin was able to develop his view of adaptation, which was highly influential in the formulation of the theory of natural selection. [2] In addition, Alfred Wallace independently used the concept of the struggle for existence to help come to the same theory of evolution. [3]
Malthusian models have the following form: = where P 0 = P(0) is the initial population size, r = the population growth rate, which Ronald Fisher called the Malthusian parameter of population growth in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, [2] and Alfred J. Lotka called the intrinsic rate of increase, [3] [4]
Around late November 1838 he compared breeders selecting traits to a Malthusian Nature selecting from random variants, now thrown up by "chance", and in mid-December described this comparison as "a beautiful part of my theory, that domesticated races of organics are made by precisely same means as species – but latter far more perfectly ...
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
Evolution as computation is a concept explored by John Mayfield in his 2013 book The Engine of Complexity: Evolution as Computation. He synthesizes core concepts from multiple disciplines to offer a new approach to understanding how evolution works, and how complex organisms, structures, organizations, and social orders can and do arise, based ...