The Birth-Death-Mutation Process: A New Paradigm for Fat Tailed Distributions

PLoS One

Yosef E. Maruvka¹  David A. Kessler¹  Nadav M. Shnerb¹ 

[1] Department of Physics, Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

关键词: Statistical distributions;    Census;    Species extinction;    Animals;    Internet;    Species diversity;    Trees;    Speciation;   

DOI  :  10.1371/journal.pone.0026480

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Public Library of Science

【 摘 要 】

Fat tailed statistics and power-laws are ubiquitous in many complex systems. Usually the appearance of of a few anomalously successful individuals (bio-species, investors, websites) is interpreted as reflecting some inherent “quality” (fitness, talent, giftedness) as in Darwin's theory of natural selection. Here we adopt the opposite, “neutral”, outlook, suggesting that the main factor explaining success is merely luck. The statistics emerging from the neutral birth-death-mutation (BDM) process is shown to fit marvelously many empirical distributions. While previous neutral theories have focused on the power-law tail, our theory economically and accurately explains the entire distribution. We thus suggest the BDM distribution as a standard neutral model: effects of fitness and selection are to be identified by substantial deviations from it.

【 授权许可】

CC BY