A Population of Exponentially Distributed Individual Lifespans Cannot Lead to Gompertzian or to Weibull (with Increasing Mortality Rate) Dynamics.
Abstract
It is well documented in the bilogical literature, that many species throughout the animal kingdom, exhibit Gompertizian or Weibull-like population level survival distributions. Many researches have long assumed, believed, or other wise postulated that an individual organism in such a population, survived according to an exponential survival distribution, using well-known results from reliability theory, it is shown that if every individual in the population is exponentially distributed, then a Gompertzian or Weibull group/population dynamics (or any other dynamics with a strictly increasing mortality rate for some interval is not possible, this implies that, for species with a population level Gompertzian or Weibull (with the mortality rate strictly increasing) servival curve, some of all of the individual organisms must have nonexponential lifespans.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 01, 1986
- Accession Number
- ADA177175
Entities
People
- Frank Guess
- Matthew Witten
Organizations
- University of South Carolina