The Population Curve

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All species of plants and animals are guaranteed extinction. If a mass extinction doesn't claim them, they will nevertheless die in a background extinction. There is nothing any interbreeding group of living entities can do about it. Extinction is a Law of Life. No species is above this law.

A healthy population pyramid exists for most of a species' history. It is a typical equilateral pyramid with few old at the top and many young at the bottom. The main constraint to aging is disease.

When Mother Nature first spawns a species of plant or animal it is nomadic. It moves around and looks for niches to occupy. The different environments that the different branches encounter enable the radiation of subspecies. These currents drift apart until they become distinct species unable to intermarry with their cousins and great grandfathers.

After countless generations and bottlenecks, a streamlined branch finally settles down and becomes sedentary. By now it has lost most of its genetic diversity and has adapted to many of the endemic diseases that kept its numbers in check...

“From an evolutionary perspective, infectious diseases have probably been the primary agent of natural selection over the past 5000 years, eliminating human hosts who were more susceptible to disease and sparing those who were more resistant. Individual biological factors that conferred protection from a specific disease could eventually be selected for in the human populations living where the disease was endemic. Thus, as first suggested by Haldane, humans adapted to infectious disease at a most basic level -- the level of the gene."

It is at this point near the end of its history that the population pyramid of a species overturns. The old live longer and the young produce fewer offspring.

The intermarriage of plants or animals that have lost their genetic diversity leads to strange genetic diseases. In humans these include many of the weird and unavoidable genetic conditions we have documented in the last few hundred years, including conjoined twins, homosexuality and autism. Overcrowding due to limitations on the carrying capacity is the pressure cooker that finally ends up annihilating the species. It dwindles into oblivion.

Man is now experiencing the ravages caused by loss of genetic diversity and asymptotic population growth. However, the last of a long dynasty of apex predators does not succumb in a background extinction. They die in a mass extinction.

Humans are the last of the hominins. There is nothing we can evolve into nor any similar species we can mate with to enrich our genetic pool. Like all other end-of-the-line apex predators, Man will die in a mass extinction. It will not be the complete overturning of the population pyramid that will do us in. It will be the economy...

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Paper presented at the

International Conference on Biology, Environment and Chemistry

(ICBEC 2010, Hong Kong, China):

..... Unsustainability

Paper presented at the

Apocalypse Conference, Oxford University

May 8, 2016, Prague, Czech Republic

We are the Last Generation of Humans on Earth

The Extinction Series...

We are the last generation of humans

How Neanderthal disappeared

How T-Rex disappeared

Economic Collapse: the end of Man!

The Population Curve

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