Evolutionary Model of Species Body Mass Diversification
Populations and Evolution
2009-01-22 v2 Biological Physics
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Abstract
We present a quantitative model for the biological evolution of species body masses within large groups of related species, e.g., terrestrial mammals, in which body mass M evolves according to branching (speciation), multiplicative diffusion, and an extinction probability that increases logarithmically with mass. We describe this evolution in terms of a convection-diffusion-reaction equation for ln M. The steady-state behavior is in good agreement with empirical data on recent terrestrial mammals, and the time-dependent behavior also agrees with data on extinct mammal species between 95 - 50 Myr ago.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0808.4014,
title = {Evolutionary Model of Species Body Mass Diversification},
author = {Aaron Clauset and Sidney Redner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0808.4014},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures