1997/10/06 by Paolo Sibani, Michael Brandt, Michael W. Brandt +2 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Biology #Demography #Ecology #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Evolutionary biology #Evolutionary dynamics #Extinction (optical mineralogy) #Extinction event #Fitness landscape #Geology #Macroevolution #Paleontology #Phylogenetic tree #Physics #Population #Statistical physics #adap-org #nlin.AO #q-bio
paper · pdf · doi:10.1142/s0217979298000259
30 pages 9 figures LaTeX
arxiv created 1997/10/06 · openalex publication_date 1998/02/10 · arxiv updated 2017/01/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
After an introductory section summarizing the paleontological data and some of their theoretical descriptions, we describe the "reset" model and its (in part analytically soluble) mean field version, which have been briefly introduced in Letters. 1,2 Macroevolution is considered as a problem of stochastic dynamics in a system with many competing agents. Evolutionary events (speciations and extinctions) are triggered by fitness records found by random exploration of the agents' fitness landscapes. As a consequence, the average fitness in the system increases logarithmically with time, while the rate of extinction steadily decreases. This non-stationary dynamics is studied by numerical simulations and, in a simpler mean field version, analytically. We also consider the effect of externally added "mass" extinctions. The predictions for various quantities of paleontological interest (life-time distribution, distribution of event sizes and behavior of the rate of extinction) are robust and in good agreement with available data.