On the Statistical Nature of Mortality, with Especial Reference to Chronic Radiation Mortality

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Abstract
The theory is presented that death is a consequence of the dynamics of physiologic processes, due to a rare fluctuation of large amplitude in the physiologic state of an animal. The statistical nature of the death process is discussed as well as an explicit model for a stochastic mortality process and the application to the analysis of radiation mortality is presented. An approximate relation between mortality rate and mean physiologic state is derived, which states that the logarithm of the mortality rate is a linear function of the mean physiologic state of a population.