Dear members of the Forum, first of all, thanks for your vigorous contributions to the several ongoing discussions, which have made this space one of the most popular ones on the Nature website.

There have been recent allusions to the ‘Elephant of the room’ taking over most contributions to the forum.

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM Surely, we all agree that humans are one species on earth, so a theory of population dynamics for all species on earth applies to us. Political or technological developments are expressions of a social context which any species has, so all the contributions from those angles should be welcome. Yet I do want to request that the discussion maintains the focus on theoretical aspects of how populations (human or otherwise) operate, and encourage any forum member to drive the attention to topics of their own interest.

LENGTH OF CONTRIBUTIONS Discussions on particular topics (sometimes) tend to move into diffuse spaces, partly because some relatively long contributions tend to be unstructured, while the many-fold points within them tend to fade away as the discussion progresses. I would appreciate if you could keep your contributions as concise as possible without losing the required level of detail. Once a topic has been proposed, a rule of thumb could be: one main message per contribution.

Salvador Herrando-Perez (Moderator)