PubMed · 8044085
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F S Doran. 1994-07-02. Is cannibalism a myth.. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.309.6946.59a
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Our systematic formulation of nonlinear population models is based on the notion of the environmental condition. The defining property of the environmental condition is that individuals are independent of one another (and hence equations are linear) when this condition is prescribed (in principle as an arbitrary function of time, but when focussing on steady states we shall restrict to constant functions). The steady-state problem has two components: (i). the environmental condition should be such that the existing populations do neither grow nor decline; (ii). a feedback consistency condition relating the environmental condition to the community/population size and composition should hold. In this paper we develop, justify and analyse basic formalism under the assumption that individuals can be born in only finitely many possible states and that the environmental condition is fully characterized by finitely many numbers. The theory is illustrated by many examples. In addition to various simple toy models introduced for explanation purposes, these include a detailed elaboration of a cannibalism model and a general treatment of how genetic and physiological structure should be combined in a single model.
The kuru epidemic lasted almost a century; it started in 1901-1902, reached epidemic proportions in the mid-1950s, and disappeared in the 1990s. Kuru is the prototype member of a group of disorders known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) or prion diseases. Recent data on the genetics and pathogenesis of TSEs contribute to a better understanding of the documented kuru phenomena, and vice versa, observations made during the kuru epidemic are immensely helpful in understanding the epidemic of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that is currently developing in Europe. The major goal of this review is to identify and illustrate these points.