Table 2.

Time-to-event distribution for disease incidence or intrinsic mortality according to whether or not the time-to-event distributions of the sufficient causes are molded by the declining force of natural selection^a.

Classification of sufficient causes	Defining category of component causes	Time-to-event distributions of the sufficient causes	Evolutionary reasoning	Asymptotic time-to-event distributionb
1. Time-to-event distributions molded by the declining force of natural selection	LOGE (without EREF)	Family of flat functions at the lower endpoint of the distribution	Intensely sustained force of natural selection in the initial years after the earliest age of reproduction (due to the extreme dependence of human offspring on parental care for a relatively long period of time) leads to flat behavior at the lower endpoint	Gompertz distribution
2. Time-to-event distributions not molded by the declining force of natural selection	EREF (with or without LOGE)	Family of regularly-varying functions at the lower endpoint of the distribution	Absence of molding by force of natural selection leads to regularly-varying behavior at the lower endpoint	Weibull distribution

^a LOGE, late-onset genetic effect(s); EREF, evolutionarily recent environmental factor(s).

^bFor large numbers of sufficient causes.