IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/safiwp/98-09-081.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Decline in Extinction Rates and Scale Invariance in the Fossil Record

Author

Listed:
  • M. E. J. Newman
  • Gunther J. Eble

Abstract

We show that the decline in the extinction rate during the Phanerozoic can be accurately parameterized by a logarithmic fit to the cumulative total extinction. This implies that extinction intensity is falling off approximately as the reciprocal of time. We demonstrate that this observation alone is sufficient to explain the existence of the proposed power-law forms in the distribution of the sizes of extinction events and in the power spectrum of Phanerozoic extinction, results which previously have been explained by appealing to self-organized critical theories of evolutionary dynamics. Appears in Paleobiology 25, 434-439 (1999).

Suggested Citation

  • M. E. J. Newman & Gunther J. Eble, 1998. "Decline in Extinction Rates and Scale Invariance in the Fossil Record," Working Papers 98-09-081, Santa Fe Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:wop:safiwp:98-09-081
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ricard V. Solé & Susanna C. Manrubia & Michael Benton & Per Bak, 1997. "Self-similarity of extinction statistics in the fossil record," Nature, Nature, vol. 388(6644), pages 764-767, August.
    2. M. E. J. Newman & Gunther J. Eble, 1998. "Power Spectra of Extinction in the Fossil Record," Working Papers 98-12-109, Santa Fe Institute.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. M. E. J. Newman & Paolo Sibani, 1998. "Extinction, Diversity, and Survivorship of Taxa in the Fossil Record," Working Papers 98-11-106, Santa Fe Institute.
    2. Ricard V. Sole & Susanna C. Manrubia & Juan Perez-Mercader & Michael Benton & Per Bak, 1998. "Long-Range Correlations in the Fossil Record and the Fractal Nature of Macroevolution," Working Papers 98-11-096, Santa Fe Institute.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. M. E. J. Newman & R. G. Palmer, 1999. "Models of Extinction: A Review," Working Papers 99-08-061, Santa Fe Institute.
    2. Marina E Wosniack & Marcos C Santos & Ernesto P Raposo & Gandhi M Viswanathan & Marcos G E da Luz, 2017. "The evolutionary origins of Lévy walk foraging," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(10), pages 1-31, October.
    3. D. Sornette & A. Helmstetter, 2002. "Endogeneous Versus Exogeneous Shocks in Systems with Memory," Papers cond-mat/0206047, arXiv.org.
    4. West, Bruce J. & West, Damien, 2011. "Are allometry and macroevolution related?," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 390(10), pages 1733-1736.
    5. Jesus Marin & Ricard V. Sole, 1998. "Macroevolutionary Algorithms: A New Optimization Method on Fitness Landscapes," Working Papers 98-11-108, Santa Fe Institute.
    6. M. E. J. Newman & Gunther J. Eble, 1998. "Power Spectra of Extinction in the Fossil Record," Working Papers 98-12-109, Santa Fe Institute.
    7. Sornette, D & Helmstetter, A, 2003. "Endogenous versus exogenous shocks in systems with memory," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 318(3), pages 577-591.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wop:safiwp:98-09-081. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/epstfus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.