Modeling Extinction

by M. E. J. Newman, R. G. Palmer

Overview

Developed 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195159462
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/20/2003
Series:	Santa Fe Institute Studies on the Sciences of Complexity
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	9.26(w) x 6.38(h) x 0.32(d)

About the Author

both at Sante Fe Institute

Table of Contents

Preface1. Extinction in the Fossil Record2. Fitness Landscape Model3. Self-Organized Critical Models4. Interspecies Connection Models5. Environmental Stress Models6. Non-equilibrium Models7. SummaryReferencesIndex