Santa Fe Institute Collaboration Platform

COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

Get Involved!
Contact: Caitlin Lorraine McShea, Program Manager, cmcshea@santafe.edu

Population and the Environment: Analytical Demography and Applied Population Ethics/ChrisKempes

From Complex Time
< Population and the Environment: Analytical Demography and Applied Population Ethics
Revision as of 21:56, January 20, 2019 by Wikiworks (talk | contribs) (Created page with "{{Attendee note |Post-meeting summary=Some of the highlights of the meeting for me were: Chris Cowie's detailed presentation of the consequences of various axiomatic assump...")

(diff) ← Older revision | Approved revision (diff) | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Notes by user Chris Kempes (SFI) for Population and the Environment: Analytical Demography and Applied Population Ethics

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

  • Presentation highlights
  • Open questions that came up
  • How your perspective changed
  • Impact on your own work
  • e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

Some of the highlights of the meeting for me were:

Chris Cowie's detailed presentation of the consequences of various axiomatic assumptions about how to make decisions affecting entire populations in terms of the two dimensions of welfare and population size. This type of thinking is nice in that it forces people to explicitly express their preference regarding different types of outcomes and understand the tradeoffs therein. The discussion that followed between Simon Levin, Chris Cowie, and Partha Dasgupta regarding the ultimate moral responsibility to unborn children was fascinating, and touched on some of the deepest moral philosophy questions. Namely tradeoffs between responsibility to self, society, existing children, and potential children where the decision to have an unborn child is connected to which of these categories of welfare one is weighting most strongly, and what one expects the future condition for the child, self, and society to be.

Caroline Bledsoe's discussion of the variety of husband perspectives on contraception across multiple wives was fascinating, highlighting the stronger connection to individual relationships rather than blanket opinions. For example, if a husband viewed contraception as a means for an individual wife to recover from child birth and delay the next birth lead generally to a receptive perspective of contraceptive use. This work connected strongly to Aisha Dasgupta's plot of a negative correlation between fertility and contraceptive prevalence across countries, where outliers in fertility at the same contraceptive use may indicate detailed cultural processes.

Mary Shenk's overview of the demographic transition and contrasting of humans with other primates was also very useful for understanding the broad-scale history of human populations.

Reference material notes

Some examples:

  • Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
  • Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
  • This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
  • Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).

Reference Materials

Title Author name Source name Year Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days. Page views Related file
Predicting maximum tree heights and other traits from allometric scaling and resource limitations Christopher P. Kempes, Geoffrey B. West, Kelly Crowell, Michelle Girvan PLoS ONE 2011 57 9

Presenter on the following Agenda items

Co-evolution of population and environment - ecological & metabolic dynamics

Presentation file
Related files

Upload a related file