John Hawks has a post up, Handling exponential growth in demographic models. You might like to read it in concert with p-ter's post Modeling human demographic history. One question I have in regards to human evolutionary genetic history is this: how typical are our population dynamics up to this point for a typical sexually reproducing species? And therefore, how might that impact deviations for our species from the norm? Also, if you are interested in the intersection of evolutionary genetics and models of demography you can go back to R. A. Fisher's Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, there's a nice, if somewhat tedious, exposition of the relevance of the latter toward developing a good model of the former.
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I like computers, really I do. Computational physics is a good thing. However, there is a small problem. The problem is that there seems to be a large number of people out there that treat numerical methods and simulations as something different than theoretical calculations.
(two entries from my old blog)
Here I am, at my parents house. There is no power at my house and Louisiana in September with no power is really a whole bunch of no-fun. But maybe I can use this time to talk about science.
**The Nature of Science**
My model has two parameters (pre 1920 rate, post 1920 rate).
Your model has four parameters (starting rate, first decrease, second
decrease, year that rate of decrease changed). The more parameters
that your model has, the easier it is to fit the data.
Frank Crary said: