%0 Journal Article
%T Reflections on the extinction-explosion dichotomy
%A Mike Steel
%J Quantitative Biology
%D 2014
%I arXiv
%X A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem that explains why this dichotomy must hold under certain assumptions concerning the process. In this note, I explore how these assumptions might be relaxed further in order to obtain the same, or a similar conclusion, and obtain both positive and negative results.
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.4713v1