Reading notes, Vaupel, post-Darvinian longevity, 2003

Reading note for Vaupel, J. W.: Post-Darwinian longevity. In: Life span: evolutionary, ecological, and demographic perspectives, (Eds.) J. R. Carey and S. Tuljapurkar. Population Council, New York 2003, 258-269 (Population and Development Review 29, Supplement). [ PDF ]

Tail of life span is defined as \tau = (x_max - x_0.1) / x_0.1.  Vaupel03 found that repair leads to shortening of  \tau, and this should be general finding. Vaupel03 generalizes redundancy, repair, and low variability as "reliability" (robustness in my model).  He concludes that reliable species have short tails of longevity and unreliable species have long tails of longevity. This counterintuitive claim makes sense, because repair increase system robustness and homogeneity, therefore outlier would be fewer.

Vaupel cited a pathbreaking article in the same volume by Shiro Horiuchi, Abernathy 1979, and Gavrilov and Gavrilova 2001.

An alternative measure is \tau' = (x_max - x_0.1) / x_median, but this seems to be equivalent to Coefficient of Variation = sigma / mean.