That looks right mathematically but seems absurd. Maybe steady state isn’t the right situation to think about this in? It’s weird that the strategy of “never reproduce” would be just as good as the usual, since not reproducing means not dying. Or we need to model the chance that the bamboo dies due to illness/fire/animals prior to getting a chance to reproduce?
Yes, I’m pretty sure there is some diminishing return after some decades (though, apparently, they hit pretty late for bamboos). Now if we stick to the absurd model with no diminishing returns, we can imagine a mutant that almost never reproduces, but when it does, it suddenly covers the entire planet, erasing all the other strains that have been growing exponentially in the meantime. The limit where it doesn’t reproduce at all is when a bamboo in a forest appears dead, but will eventually turn the entire universe into copies of itself when comes the Armageddon.
That looks right mathematically but seems absurd. Maybe steady state isn’t the right situation to think about this in? It’s weird that the strategy of “never reproduce” would be just as good as the usual, since not reproducing means not dying. Or we need to model the chance that the bamboo dies due to illness/fire/animals prior to getting a chance to reproduce?
Yes, I’m pretty sure there is some diminishing return after some decades (though, apparently, they hit pretty late for bamboos). Now if we stick to the absurd model with no diminishing returns, we can imagine a mutant that almost never reproduces, but when it does, it suddenly covers the entire planet, erasing all the other strains that have been growing exponentially in the meantime. The limit where it doesn’t reproduce at all is when a bamboo in a forest appears dead, but will eventually turn the entire universe into copies of itself when comes the Armageddon.