Modeling ExtinctionDeveloped after a meeting at the Santa Fe Institute on extinction modeling, this book comments critically on the various modeling approaches. In the last decade or so, scientists have started to examine a new approach to the patterns of evolution and extinction in the fossil record. This approach may be called "statistical paleontology," since it looks at large-scale patterns in the record and attempts to understand and model their average statistical features, rather than their detailed structure. Examples of the patterns these studies examine are the distribution of the sizes of mass extinction events over time, the distribution of species lifetimes, or the apparent increase in the number of species alive over the last half a billion years. In attempting to model these patterns, researchers have drawn on ideas not only from paleontology, but from evolutionary biology, ecology, physics, and applied mathematics, including fitness landscapes, competitive exclusion, interaction matrices, and self-organized criticality. A self-contained review of work in this field. |
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abiotic alleles Amaral and Meyer appears approximately average fitness Bak-Sneppen model barrier to mutation behavior biotic coevolutionary avalanches discussed in section distribution of extinction dynamics epistatic evolution evolutionary evolve exponential extinction intensity extinction mechanism extinction rate figure fitness contribution fitness landscape fitness peak follows a power fossil data fossil record genera genotype genus higher taxa histogram increase interactions Jack Sepkoski Kauffman and Johnsen large extinction events lifetimes lowest barrier Manrubia and Paczuski mass extinction events models of extinction Nash equilibrium neighboring species Newman and Roberts Newman's model niches NK model number of families number of genes number of species Phanerozoic power-law distribution power-law form predictions pseudoextinction Raup replaced result Santa Fe Institute scale self-organized critical Sepkoski Sibani Signor-Lipps effect simulation sizes of extinction Sneppen Solé and Manrubia Solé-Manrubia model speciation species becoming extinct stage survivorship curve taxon taxonomic true extinction Vandewalle and Ausloos