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The natural growth rate of populations enables them to produce more offspring that can be supported by the environment. This idea provoked Malthus (1798) to propose that there would be an inevitable crisis for human civilization given that population increases exponentially but humanity’s ability to produce food likely would only increase linearly. //
In ecology, as Cushman (2023) described, thermodynamics and entropy have been largely ignored, except for the field of macroecology (Brown, 1995) and the use of information theory, particularly in the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology (Harte and Newman, 2014).
What is Genetic Entropy? It is the genetic degeneration of living things. Genetic entropy is the systematic breakdown of the internal biological information systems that make life alive. Genetic entropy results from genetic mutations, which are typographical errors in the programming of life (life’s instruction manuals). Mutations systematically erode the information that encodes life’s many essential functions. Biological information consists of a large set of specifications, and random mutations systematically scramble these specifications – gradually but relentlessly destroying the programming instructions essential to life.
Is our genome decaying (see "Genetic Entropy"), and, if so, is this evidence for our genome being "young"?
In the book Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome the author says that the genome cannot be old because the genome is "decaying". Decay is a very subjective term, but in this case he means that the fitness of humans is going down not up. Is it true that our genome is decaying over time, and that the fitness of humans is decreasing? ....