|
| | | | |
| | | |
| Stat |
Members: 3644
Articles: 2'499'343
Articles rated: 2609
16 April 2024 |
|
| | | | |
|
Article overview
| |
|
|
A Simple Explanation for Taxon Abundance Patterns | | Johan Chu
; Chris Adami
; | | Date: |
1 Feb 2000 | | Journal: | Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 96 (1999) 15017 | | Subject: | Biological Physics; Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability; Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems; Populations and Evolution | physics.bio-ph nlin.AO physics.data-an q-bio.PE | | Affiliation: | Caltech | | Abstract: | For taxonomic levels higher than species, the abundance distributions of number of subtaxa per taxon tend to approximate power laws, but often show strong deviationns from such a law. Previously, these deviations were attributed to finite-time effects in a continuous time branching process at the generic level. Instead, we describe here a simple discrete branching process which generates the observed distributions and find that the distribution’s deviation from power-law form is not caused by disequilibration, but rather that it is time-independent and determined by the evolutionary properties of the taxa of interest. Our model predicts-with no free parameters-the rank-frequency distribution of number of families in fossil marine animal orders obtained from the fossil record. We find that near power-law distributions are statistically almost inevitable for taxa higher than species. The branching model also sheds light on species abundance patterns, as well as on links between evolutionary processes, self-organized criticality and fractals. | | Source: | arXiv, physics/0002001 | | Other source: | [GID 582124] pnas | | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites | |
|
|
No review found.
Did you like this article?
Note: answers to reviews or questions about the article must be posted in the forum section.
Authors are not allowed to review their own article. They can use the forum section.
browser claudebot
|
| |
|
|
|
|
News, job offers and information for researchers and scientists:
| |
REGISTER