The longterm historical decline in infant mortality has been accompanied by increasing concentration of infant deaths at the earliest stages of infancy. The influence of prenatal and neonatal conditions has become increasingly dominant relative to postnatal conditions as external causes of death...

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Humans, and many other species, suffer senescence: mortality increases and fertility declines with adult age. Some species, however, enjoy sustenance: mortality and fertility remain constant. Here we develop simple but general evolutionary-demographic models to explain the conditions that favor...

Patterns of diversity in age at death are examined using e†, a dispersion measure that also equals the average expected lifetime lost at death. We apply two methods for decomposing differences in e†. The first method estimates the contributions of average levels of mortality and mortality...

The evolution of different life history strategies and thus different ageing patterns essentially depends on the nature of the underlying trade-offs between survival and reproduction. To fully comprehend ageing, we need to understand these trade-offs.

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Hamilton quantified the force of selection on an age-specific mutation. Hamilton’s indicators of the age-specific force of selection always decline with age. This result is of profound importance to the theory of the evolution of senescence. Here I derive alternative indicators within...

We study inter-individual variability in number of children among women. Concentration ratio (CR) and percentile measures are used. In most countries CR has increasing from cohorts of the 1930s-40s onward due to rise in childlessness. In cohorts of the early 1960s CR varies from 0.24 to 0.46...

This paper presents a toolkit for measuring and analysing inter-individual inequality in length of life by Gini coefficient. Gini coefficient is treated as an additional function of the life table. A new method for the estimation of Gini coefficient from life table data has been developed and...

A general algorithm for the decomposition of differences between two values of an aggregate demographic measure in respect to age and other dimensions is proposed. It assumes that the aggregate measure is computed from similar matrices of discrete demographic data for two populations under...