Stochastic and statistical models in the biodemography of aging

老龄化科学的新发展在人口学和人口生物学之间架起了一座桥梁。一方面，我们对人类种群中的生命统计数据进行探索和编目，另一方面，我们对非人类物种的生长和生活史进行观察和实验研究。在这个新的“生物人口学”领域，人口学家将他们的范围扩大到我们自己的物种之外，并吸收了生活史的进化论。就生物学家而言，他们既采用了人口学的定量技术，又关注测量大种群的存活率。尤其是对衰老研究的影响是巨大的。如今，随着经验数据与久负盛名的数学模型发生冲突，生物人口学正在发生变化。该项目将推进生物人口学的数学生物学，制定和分析新的模型，并扩展将模型与数据联系起来的统计方法。模型的作用是在具体实例和一般结构之间进行转换，为解释实验结果提供背景，并指导新的实验。这个项目的一些目标是纯粹的数学，包括开发一个新的模型来解释微小的特定年龄突变的进化，一些人认为这些突变是衰老的根本原因。另一些目标是数据分析，比如与加州的果蝇和线虫实验室合作，量化这些生物随着年龄的增长行为的变化。该项目的许多组成部分跨越了这种鸿沟，比如与研究人员合作，收集关于人类和其他物种的性别比例和社会支持的新数据。这里的目标是开发新的数学模型，以公平地对待数据，并有助于阐明社会支持在老龄化演变中的作用。

New developments in the science of aging have struck a bridge between demography and population biology.  On the one side we have the exploration and cataloguing of vital statistics in human populations, on the other we have observational and experimental studies of growth and life-histories in nonhuman species.  In this new field of "biodemography", the demographers have expanded their scope beyond our own species, and assimilated the evolutionary theory of life histories.  The biologists, for their part, have adopted both the quantitative techniques of demography, and the concern with measuring survival in large populations. The repercussions for the study of aging, in particular, have been momentous. Biodemography today is in flux, as empirical data collide with time-honoured mathematical models. This project will advance the mathematical biology of biodemography, formulating and analysing new models, and extend the statistical methods for linking the models to data.  The modelling serves to translate between specific instances and general structures,  to provide context for the interpretation of experimental findings, and to guide new experiments. Some goals of this project are purely mathematical, including the development of a new model for explaining the evolution of tiny age-specific mutations that some believe are the root cause of aging.  Other goals are data analysis, such as the collaboration with fruit fly and nematode laboratories in California to quantify the changes in behaviour of those organisms with age.  Many components of the project straddle this divide, such as the collaboration with researchers collecting new data on sex-ratio and social support in humans and other species.  Here the goal is to develop new mathematical models which do justice to the data, and help to clarify the role of social support in the evolution of aging.