Innovation and the growth of human population.

ABSTRACT: Biodiversity is sustained by and is essential to the services that ecosystems provide. Different species would use these services in different ways, or adaptive strategies, which are sustained in time by continuous innovations. Using this framework, we postulate a model for a biological species (Homo sapiens) in a finite world where innovations, aimed at increasing the flux of ecosystem services (a measure of habitat quality), increase with population size, and have positive effects on the generation of new innovations (positive feedback) as well as costs in terms of negatively affecting the provision of ecosystem services. We applied this model to human populations, where technological innovations are driven by cumulative cultural evolution. Our model shows that depending on the net impac

SUBMITTER: Weinberger VP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5665803 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature