Related papers: A Simple Explanation for Taxon Abundance Patterns
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…
Scale-free dynamics in physical and biological systems can arise from a variety of causes. Here, we explore a branching process which leads to such dynamics. We find conditions for the appearance of power laws and study quantitatively what…
The abundance of a species' population in an ecosystem is rarely stationary, often exhibiting large fluctuations over time. Using historical data on marine species, we show that the year-to-year fluctuations of population growth rate obey a…
Time evolution of number of species (genera, families, and others), population of them, and size distribution of present ones and life times are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each genetic taxon increases by a (random)…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Power law distributions have been repeatedly observed in a wide variety of socioeconomic, biological and technological areas. In many of the observations, e.g., city populations and sizes of living organisms, the objects of interest evolve…
We present a new model for extinction in which species evolve in bursts or `avalanches', during which they become on average more susceptible to environmental stresses such as harsh climates and so are more easily rendered extinct. Results…
Highly-diverse ecosystems exhibit a broad distribution of population sizes and species turnover, where species at high and low abundances are exchanged over time. We show that these two features generically emerge in the fluctuating phase…
Stochastic models, based on random processes, may lead to power law distributions, which provide long range correlations. The observation of power law behavior and the presence of long range correlations in biological systems has been…
Several populational networks present complex topologies when implemented in evolutionary algorithms. A common feature of these topologies is the emergence of a power law. Power law behavior with different scaling factors can also be…
We introduce a model for the evolution of species triggered by generation of novel features and exhaustive combination with other available traits. Under the assumption that innovations are rare, we obtain a bursty branching process of…
The evolutionary origin of universal statistics in biochemical reaction network is studied, to explain the power-law distribution of reaction links and the power-law distributions of chemical abundances. Using cell models with catalytic…
Statistical analysis indicates that the fossil extinction record is compatible with a distribution of extinction events whose frequency is related to their size by a power law with an exponent close to two. This result is in agreement with…
An analytic theory of species abundance patterns (SAPs) in biological networks is presented. The theory is based on multispecies replicator dynamics equivalent to the Lotka-Volterra equation, with diverse interspecies interactions. Various…
The distribution of species body size within taxonomic groups exhibits a heavy right-tail extending over many orders of magnitude, where most species are significantly larger than the smallest species. We provide a simple model of…
In this work we model the dynamics of a population that evolves as a continuous time branching process with a trait structure and ecological interactions in form of mutations and competition between individuals. We generalize existing…
Over the last few decades power law distributions have been suggested as forming generative mechanisms in a variety of disparate fields, such as, astrophysics, criminology and database curation. However, fitting these heavy tailed…
Community assembly is studied using individual-based multispecies models. The models have stochastic population dynamics with mutation, migration, and extinction of species. Mutants appear as a result of mutation of the resident species,…
Motivated as a null model for comparison with data, we study the following model for a phylogenetic tree on $n$ extant species. The origin of the clade is a random time in the past, whose (improper) distribution is uniform on $(0,\infty)$.…