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Biomedical subjects

P A Samuelson

Publications and source records attributed to P A Samuelson.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1989

A case at last for age-phased reduction in equity.

Maximizing expected utility over a lifetime leads one who has constant relative risk aversion and faces random-walk securities returns to be "myopic" and hold the same fraction of portfolio in equities early and late in life--a defiance of folk wisdom and casual introspection. By assuming one needs to assure at retirement a minimum ("subsistence") level of wealth, the present analysis deduces a pattern of greater risk-taking when young than when old. When a subsistence minimum is needed at every period of life, the rentier paradoxically is least risk tolerant in youth--the Robert C. Merton paradox that traces to the decline with age of the present discounted value of the subsistence-consumption requirements. Conversely, the decline with age of capitalized human capital reverses the Merton effect.

Aging↗
PubMed1978

Generalizing Fisher's "reproductive value": overlapping and nonoverlapping generations with competing genotypes.

How to go beyond Fisher's 1930 linear eigenvector definition of reproductive value has been established for dilute systems whose dynamic relations are first-degree-homogeneous functions so that intensive ratios are scale-free. Here such an extension is applied to standard mendelian models. It is shown that, aside from singular cases like that of the Hardy-Weinberg razor's-edge labile equilibrium, such general systems are irreducibly nonlinear and admit of reproductive value functions that are calculable only in an infinite number of steps.

Genetics, Population↗
PubMed1977

Generalizing Fisher's "reproductive value": linear differential and difference equations of "dilute" biological systems.

R. A. Fisher's 1930 "reproductive value" is defined as the contribution made by a population's initial age elements to its asymptotically dominating exponential growth mode. For the Leslie discrete-time model, it is the characteristic row vector of the Leslie matrix, and for the integral-equation model of Lotka the similar eigenfunction. It generalizes neatly to a 2-sex model of linear differential equations, and to general n-variable linear systems. However, when resource limitations end the "dilute" stage of linearity, reproductive value loses positive definability. The present linear analysis prepares the way for generalizing reproductive value to nonlinear systems involving first-degree-homogeneous relationships.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1974

A dynamical model for human population.

We analyze a simple, deterministic model of the dynamics of population changes in a bisexual, reproductive system based on marriage. Our model is one of a general class, special cases of which have been previously discussed within the framework of population biology by D. G. Kendall, L. A. Goodman, J. H. Pollard, and others. Here, we extend and complete previous analyses of systems characterized by first-degree homogeneous, unbounded marriage functions, allowing for arbitrary birth and death rates. The dynamics of the model is determined by three coupled first-order, nonlinear differential equations, similar to those used in the description of chemical reactions and of radioactive decay chains. Solutions of the differential equation system are classified according to the associated patterns of birth and death rates of the two sexes, and growth and stability properties are discussed. This preliminary report gives conditions sufficient to insure the existence of a unique, exponential mode of population growth or decay, with a finite ratio of the sexes. We also exhibit other conditions which, in contrast to the standard, linear demographic analysis of Lotka, guarantee that the sex ratio asymptotically becomes infinite. The model manifests a delicate balance between the vital parameters that alerts one to the possibility of selfaggravating distortions of the sex ratio, once a monogamous society's fertility falls below the replacement value.

Birth Rate↗
PubMed1974

A biological least-action principle for the ecological model of Volterra-Lotka.

The conservative model of Volterra for more-than-two predator-prey species is shown to be generated as extremals that minimize a definable Lagrange-Hamilton integral involving half the species and their rates of change. This least-action formulation differs from that derived two generations ago by Volterra, since his involves twice the number of phase variables and it employs as variables the cumulative integrals of the numbers of each species that have ever lived. The present result extends the variational, teleological formulations found a decade ago by the author to the more-than-two species case. The present result is anything but surprising, in view of the works by Kerner, Montroll, and others which apply Gibbs' statistical mechanics to the all-but-canonical equations of the standard Volterra model. By a globally linear transformation of coordinates, the Volterra equations are here converted into a completely canonical system isomorphic with the classical mechanics models of Newton, Lagrange, Hamilton, Jacobi, Boltzmann, Gibbs, Poincaré, and G. D. Birkhoff. The conservative nature of the Lotka-Volterra model, whatever its realism, is a crucially necessary condition for the applicability of the variational formalisms, microscopically and macroscopically.

Animals↗
PubMed1971

Generalized predator-prey oscillations in ecological and economic equilibrium.

The standard predator-prey model is generalized beyond the Volterra linear-log form. Conservative oscillations are deduced and also conversion to a variational Hamiltonian form. Generalization to more than two species is also castable into Hamiltonian form, with small vibrations around equilibrium being of undamped sinusoidal type by virtue of associated characteristic exponents all being pure imaginaries. However, introduction into ecological equilibrium of a recognition of limited space and inorganic matter destroys the autonomous periodicity of the motions and makes inapplicable the elegant formalisms of classical statistical mechanics. Introduction of simple diminishing returns leads to damped motions that are kept cyclically alive by shocks of the weather and other exogenous stochastic elements. Introduction of increasing returns solely in an interval near equilibrium leads to autonomous self-exciting oscillations near a stable limit cycle; under stochastic forcing functions, a long-run ergodic state becomes predictable.

Aggression↗