A mechanistic model of the S-shaped population growth

The main idea of this note is to show the most basic and purely mechanistic model of population growth, which has been used by us to create models of interspecific competition for verification of the competitive exclusion principle (1, 2). Our logical deterministic individual-based cellular automata model demonstrates a spatio-temporal mechanism of the S-shaped population growth. A classical model of the S-shaped population growth is the Verhulst model. Unfortunately, this is completely non-mechanistic (black-box) model as the internal structure of the complex system and mechanisms remain hidden (3). Here I show a completely mechanistic 'white-box' model of the S-shaped population growth (Fig. 1 and Movie S1). Figure 1. S-shaped population growth. A logical deterministic individual-based cellular automata model of single species population dynamics (Movie S1). a, S-shaped population growth curve. b, Cellular automata lattice at the 30 th iteration.