Population
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In biology, the term population refers to all living things of the same group or species, living in a particular geographic area.
In sociology, it refers to a group of human beings or the entire species. Demography is a social science that involves the statistical study of the human population. Population, in a simpler term, is the number of people in a city or town, region, country or world; the population is generally determined by a process called the census, that is, a process of collecting, analyzing, compiling and publishing data on the population and other related variables such as location of residence, housing, income, educational level and others.
In human geography, it has a very important meaning as an object of study, which fully justifies the existence of population geography.
Definition
According to the Dictionary of the Spanish language, edited by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), the term population (from Latin) is defined late populatio, -ōnis, 'plunder', 'devastation'), first as "the action or effect of populating' 34; (founding one or more towns). In addition, the RAE proposes other meanings of the term population:
- Set of people living in a particular place.
- Set of buildings and spaces in a city. It crossed the population from one side to another.
- Set of individuals of the same species who occupy a given geographical area.
- Set of elements subject to a statistical assessment by sampling.
From the legal and constitutional point of view, the concept of population is used to indicate the same human group but as an indeterminate component element of the State, as it refers to all its inhabitants without considering their condition. Differentiating from the term people that usually refers to a part of the population that receives special treatment by the State according to the specific political or legal regime that characterizes it.
Biological population
In the life sciences, population is the totality of individuals, generally of the same species, found in a given area. As a result of the interactions between the members of this population unit, a constant mixing of their genes occurs through gene flow. Therefore, populations are also a starting point for evolutionary changes in the species in question.
In 1971, Edward O. Wilson and his team of collaborators used the term mathematical model, applying it to population genetics, community ecology, and population dynamics. Alan Hastings used the term in 1997 as the title of his book on the mathematics used in population dynamics. The name was also used for a course taught at UC Davis in the late 2010s, describing it as an interdisciplinary field that combines the areas of ecology and evolutionary biology. The course includes mathematics, statistics, ecology, genetics, and systematics. Numerous types of organisms are studied.
The interactions that are of interest in individual cases are not always congruent within biological disciplines. In population genetics, for example, special emphasis is placed on the fact that individuals are linked to each other due to their developmental processes. In population ecology, emphasis is placed on the fact that individuals are found in a uniform area at the same time. In demography and epidemiology, in addition to the characteristics of individuals and their variation, regional genetic and geographic factors, social interactions in particular also play an essential role in defining populations.
In addition to these specifically biological definitions, biology often speaks of a "population" in a purely statistical sense as a population (arbitrarily defined) from which certain properties and their distribution are determined by random samples.
Genetic population
When considering genetic and evolutionary issues, a population is generally defined as a group of individuals of the same species that can mate during sexual reproduction and, at least in principle, can have common offspring. It is not just about the genetic and physiological ability to mate, but also about an opportunity to do so. Individuals of a species that live in spatially completely separate habitats and can only produce offspring with experimental manipulation by humans, for example in the laboratory or in captivity, are therefore (mostly) counted as belonging to the species. same species, but never to the same population. Therefore, a species usually comprises many populations, with very small populations, such as local endemic populations, possibly only one. If individuals live next to each other in the same habitat, which would be physiologically capable of mating with each other, but never do so in practice (called: reproductive isolation), they do not belong to the same population. This is an essential difference for ecologically defined populations. Species that reproduce by asexual reproduction do not, in this sense, form a population either.
Population ecology
Population size
The population size (usually denoted N) is the number of individual organisms in a population. Population size is directly associated with the amount of genetic drift, and is the underlying cause of effects such as population bottlenecks and the founder effect. Genetic drift is the main source of decreased genetic diversity within of populations, which drives fixation and can lead to speciation events.
Population genetics
Population genetics is a field of biology that studies the genetic makeup of biological populations and changes in genetic makeup that result from the operation of various factors, such as natural selection. Population geneticists pursue their goals by developing abstract mathematical models of gene frequency dynamics, trying to draw conclusions from those models about likely patterns of genetic variation in real populations, and testing the conclusions with empirical data.
Population statistics
In statistics, a population is a set of similar elements or events that are of interest to some question or experiment. It can be a group of existing objects or a hypothetical and potentially infinite group of objects conceived as a generalization from experience. A common goal of statistical analysis is to produce information about some chosen population.
Human population
Anthropological Population
In anthropology, population denotes a group of people who are connected to each other by the history of their origin, form a reproductive community and at the same time live in a defined spatial area. Population, therefore, is not simply a synonymous term used in place of the biological terms "race" or "subspecies".
Population and Geography
Population geography is a branch of human geography. It is the study of the ways in which spatial variations in the distribution, composition, migration, and growth of populations are related to the nature of places. Population geography involves demography in a geographic perspective. It focuses on the characteristics of population distributions that change in a spatial context. This often involves factors such as where populations are found and how the size and composition of these populations is regulated by the demographic processes of fertility, mortality, and migration.
Population and economy
The active population is understood as part of the population of a country of working age, whether they have a job or not. It is associated with the rate of the active population, which is expressed as a percentage of the total population.
Population and resources
Natural resource exploitation is the use of natural resources for economic growth, sometimes with a negative connotation of environmental degradation, and is closely related to population growth and its demands.
Population and law
The population is the totality of individuals that inhabit the territory of a state. According to this meaning, the term has two aspects: one, demographic or quantitative, referring to its number and density; another, demological or qualitative, linked to race, heredity and selection.
World population
According to documents released by the United States Census Bureau, the world population reached 6.5 billion on February 24, 2006. The United Nations Population Fund designated October 12, 1999 as the approximate day when the world population reached 6 billion. This was about 12 years after the world population reached 5 billion in 1987, and six years after the world population reached 5.5 billion in 1993. The population of countries like Nigeria is not even known to one million. closest, so there is a considerable margin of error in such estimates.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the world population was approximately 7.55 billion in 2019 and that the number of 7 billion was surpassed on March 12, 2012. According to a separate estimate from the United Nations, the Earth's population passed seven billion in October 2011, a milestone that offers unprecedented challenges and opportunities for all of humanity, according to UNFPA.
According to the UN, the world population reached eight billion on November 15, 2022.
Researcher Carl Haub estimated that a total of more than 100 billion people were probably born in the last 2,000 years.
Expected growth and decline
Population growth increased significantly as the Industrial Revolution accelerated from 1800 onwards. The last 50 years have seen an even faster increase in the rate of population growth due to medical advances and increases in population growth. changes in agricultural productivity, particularly since the 1960s, carried out by the Green Revolution. In 2017, the United Nations Population Division projected that the world population will reach about 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100.
In the future, the world population is expected to increase, after which it will decrease due to economic reasons, health problems, land depletion, and environmental risks. According to a report, the world's population will most likely stop growing before the end of the XXI century. In addition, there is some probability that the population will decline before 2100. The population has already declined in the last decade or two in Eastern Europe, the Baltics, and in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
New UN projections presented in 2022 estimated that the world population would reach 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.0 billion in 2037 and 9.7 billion in 2050 until reaching a peak of 10.4 billion of inhabitants during the 2080s, remaining at this level until the year 2100.
The population pattern of the less developed regions of the world in recent years has been marked by the gradual increase in birth rates. These followed an earlier sharp reduction in death rates. This transition from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates is often called the demographic transition.
Control
Human population control is the practice of altering the growth rate of a human population. Historically, human population control has been implemented with the goal of slowing the rate of population growth. In the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, concerns about world population growth and its increasing effects on poverty, environmental degradation, and political stability led to efforts to reduce population growth rates. While population control can include measures that improve people's lives by giving them greater control over their reproduction, some programs, notably the Chinese government's one-child-per-family policy, have resorted to coercive measures. To control for population structure, it measures through the Efficient Mixed Model Association (EMMA) method, which corrects for population structure and genetic relatedness in model organism association mapping.
In the 1978s, stress rose among population control advocates and women's health activists who promoted women's reproductive rights as part of a human rights-based approach. Growing opposition to the narrow approach to population control led to a significant change in population control policies in the early 1980s.
In medical research
A population is a set of individuals from which a sample is selected and to which the results obtained for this sample can be extended. The population may be the entire population (usually those in epidemiological studies of disease causes) or may consist of patients hospitalized in a particular clinic or patients with a specific disease (which is more common in clinical trials). Therefore, one can talk about the general population or the population of patients with a specific disease. The epidemiological definition of a population differs from the biological (environmental) one.
Population at risk
Group of people who, due to their genetic, physical or social characteristics, are more prone to suffering from a certain disease. A person's perception of risk and their reaction to it depend on their experience and the information and values received from their environment. It is a learning process that begins in childhood and is constantly updated. Some risks are beyond individual control, but others depend on each person, who can increase or decrease them at will.
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