Reflections on Modeling and Theory in Population Biology: Joel Cohen скачать в хорошем качестве

Reflections on Modeling and Theory in Population Biology: Joel Cohen

James O'Dwyer (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Sally Otto (UBC) interviewed Joel Cohen, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations at the Rockefeller University. We chatted with Joel as he recounted his trajectory from musical composition, to earthworm behavior, to ecology and public health. Some highlights below: -- The classic books that influenced Joel: Lotka, Alfred J. 1925 Elements of Physical Biology. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. Reprinted 1956: Elements of Mathematical Biology. Dover, New York. 460 pp. Rashevsky, Nicholas 1938 Mathematical Biophysics: Physico-Mathematical Foundations of Biology. Univ. of Chicago Press (2nd ed. 1948). Dover 1960 Slobodkin, L. B. 1961 Growth and Regulation of Animal Populations. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. Reprinted by Dover Publications, New York. -- On advice to students: "Learn as much mathematics as you can...AND do the biology first-hand. "Be prepared to be ignorant and learning your whole life." Also, reading the right introductory papers can help to guide students who are new to theoretical biology. Joel recommended: 1988 (H. Caswell) Theory and models in ecology: A different perspective. Ecological Modelling 43:33-44. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...) -- One of Joel's “aha” moments was the development of the Cascade model for food webs, in collaboration with Newman and Briand, published across multiple stages in PRSB. The first four are: 1985 (J. E. Cohen, Charles M. Newman) A stochastic theory of community food webs: I. Models and aggregated data. Proceedings of the Royal Society (London) series B 224:421-448. 1985 (J. E. Cohen, Charles M. Newman, Frédéric Briand) A stochastic theory of community food webs: II. Individual webs. Proceedings of the Royal Society (London) series B 224:449-461. 1986 (Cohen, Joel E., Briand, Frédéric and Newman, Charles M.) A stochastic theory of community food webs. III. Predicted and observed lengths of food chains. Proceedings of the Royal Society (London) series B 228:317-353. 1986 (Newman, Charles M. and Cohen, Joel E.) A stochastic theory of community food webs. IV. Theory of food chain lengths in large webs. Proceedings of the Royal Society (London) series B 228:355-377. -- Some of Joel's favorite papers of his that he wishes were better known: 1) Large random matrices and conditions that govern stability: 1984 (J. E. Cohen, Charles M. Newman) The stability of large random matrices and their products. Annals of Probability 12(2):283-310. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2243473?seq=1) and 1985 (J. E. Cohen, C. M. Newman) When will a large complex system be stable? Journal of Theoretical Biology 113:153-156. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... 2) On generalizing Taylor's law to distributions with infinite mean: 2017 (Mark Brown, J. E. Cohen, Victor de la Peña) Taylor’s law, via ratios, for some distributions with infinite mean. Journal of Applied Probability 54(3):657-669. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/jo...) 3) On the challenge of inferring underlying processes from a variance function (like Taylor's law). J. E. Cohen (2020) Every variance function, including Taylor's power law of fluctuation scaling, can be produced by any location-scale family of distributions with positive mean and variance. Theoretical Ecology 13(1):1-5. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/... correction (2022) Theoretical Ecology 15:93-94. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/...) -- Finally, please check out Joel's recent talk on very general applications of population biology, available here on the SMTPB youtube account:    • Joel E. Cohen, Rockefeller University  .