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Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Prey-producing predators: the ecology of human intensification
Organization Unit
Authors
  • C Efferson
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences
Publisher Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 1090-0578
Volume 12
Number 1
Page Range 55 - 74
Date 2008
Abstract Text Economic growth theory and theoretical ecology represent independent traditions of modeling aggregate consumer-resource systems. Both focus on different but equally important forces underlying the dynamics of human societies. Though the two traditions have unknowingly converged in some ways, they each have curious conventions from the perspective of the other. These conventions are reviewed, and two separate modeling frameworks that integrate the two traditions in a simple and straightforward fashion are developed and analyzed. The resulting models represent a consumer species (e.g. humans) that both produces and consumes its resources and then reproduces biologically according to the consumption of its resources. Depending on the balance between production, consumption, and reproduction, the models can exhibit stagnant behavior, like some predator-prey models, or growth, like many mutualism and economic growth models. When growth occurs, in the long term it takes one of two forms. Either resources per capita grow and the human population size converges to a constant, which may be zero, or resources per capita converge to a constant and the human population grows. The difference depends on initial conditions and the particular mix of biological conditions and human technology.
Official URL http://www.societyforchaostheory.org/ndpls/
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