Power of the power-laws: lessons from unification of "micro" and "macr o" evolution
Abstract
It has been argued in the literature that power law distributions describe the statistics of extinctions of species recorded in the fossils. But, are these arguments powerful enough to rule out any other forms of distributions? In order to address these questions, we develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes the ``micro''-evolution over ecological time scales (i.e., birth, ageing and natural death of individual organisms) while the appearance of new nodes, the slow changes of the links and the disappearance of existing nodes accounts for the ``macro'' evolution over geological time scales (i.e., the origination, evolution and extinction of species). We observe strong deviations from power law in the regime of long life times where the statistics is, usually, poor.Keywords
All Related Versions
This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: