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By now, it is a widely accepted view to analogize Malthusian growth in Ecology to Newton's First Law of uniform motion in physics. [8] Malthus wrote that all life forms, including humans, have a propensity to exponential population growth when resources are abundant but that actual growth is limited by available resources:
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.
After some period, it will be slowed by external or environmental factors. For example, population growth may reach an upper limit due to resource limitations. [9] In 1845, the Belgian mathematician Pierre François Verhulst first proposed a mathematical model of growth like this, called the "logistic growth". [10]
The beginning of population dynamics is widely regarded as the work of Malthus, formulated as the Malthusian growth model. According to Malthus, assuming that the conditions (the environment) remain constant (ceteris paribus), a population will grow (or decline) exponentially.
As resources become more limited, the growth rate tapers off, and eventually, once growth rates are at the carrying capacity of the environment, the population size will taper off. [6] This S-shaped curve observed in logistic growth is a more accurate model than exponential growth for observing real-life population growth of organisms. [8]
Original image of a logistic curve, contrasted with what Verhulst called a "logarithmic curve" (in modern terms, "exponential curve") The logistic function was introduced in a series of three papers by Pierre François Verhulst between 1838 and 1847, who devised it as a model of population growth by adjusting the exponential growth model, under the guidance of Adolphe Quetelet. [5]
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] The controversy, however, concerns the relevance of Malthusian theory in the present world.
The Limits to Growth (LTG) is a 1972 report [2] that discussed the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation. [3] The study used the World3 computer model to simulate the consequence of interactions between the Earth and human systems.