Stochastic failure accumulation as a foundation for exponential mortality and selective disappearance

Greater interdependence among stochastic, failure-and-repair sub-systems within individuals is linked to faster demographic senescence, yielding population-level mortality curves derived via diffusion approximations.

• Why it matters: Demographic senescence and late-life mortality plateaus are observed patterns, but their mechanistic origins and when Gompertz-Makeham forms emerge remain unclear.
• What they did: The framework models each individual as a fixed number of interacting intra-organismal sub-systems with stochastic failure and repair, using diffusion approximations to connect failure dynamics to mortality.
• The result: Selective disappearance of “unlucky” individuals creates deviations from individual-level trajectories and can produce late-life plateaus; the model provides necessary and asymptotically sufficient conditions for Gompertz-Makeham mortality and falsifiable scaling predictions near complete failure.

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