PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

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Inanimate Production Like Animate
Reproduction
What do computers and rabbits have in common? They can multiply.
What’s more, they do it in just about the same way!
• • •
The Belgian mathematician P. F. Verhulst must be considered as the
grandfather of S-curves. He was the first to postulate a law containing a
limitation for the growth of populations, back in 1845. He argued that a
given niche has a finite capacity for maintaining a population and that
the growth rate should drop when the population size approaches the
niche capacity. 1 Later on, many people developed this subject further.
Two men of science built a mathematical formulation linking the population
of a species to the one on which it feeds. The system of equations
that bears their names became widely accepted by biologists and ecologists
as the foundation of competitive growth models. These two men
were Alfred J. Lotka and Vito Volterra.
The careers of both Lotka and Volterra culminated during the early
decades of the twentieth century. At that time the borderlines between
disciplines were not felt as strongly as today. Lotka, for example, a
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