events. Surprisingly, replicators evolved by mutant incorporation are always permanent, despite the fact that permanence is …, hence, to complete extinction. In both cases, individual species are short-lived, the distribution of survival times is …

recent years. These include the average decline in extinction rates throughout the Phanerozoic, the average increase in … standing diversity, correlations between rates of origination and extinction, and simple laws governing the form of … possible forms of these trends, such as limits on the rate at which extinction may decline and limits on the allowed difference …

Recently, it has been shown that the power spectrum of extinction intensity during the Phanerozoic takes a power …-law form, which, it is suggested, may indicate the presence of critical phenomena in the dynamics underlying the extinction … average extinction rate during the Phanerozoic. Thus, there is no need to invoke critical phenomena to explain the observed …

have important implications in issues like the process of extinction and diversification or in understanding how …

Recent Fourier analyses of fossil extinction data have indicated that the power spectrum of extinction during the … "critical dynamics" in the processes giving rise to extinction. In this paper we examine extinction power spectra in some detail …

. Crashes are events that involve the rapid extinction of many species and recoveries the assimilation of new ones. These are … is the extinction of a 'keystone species.' Different classes of causes produce crashes of different characteristic size. …

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 …-law forms in the distribution of the sizes of extinction events and in the power spectrum of Phanerozoic extinction, results …

We review recent work aimed at modelling species extinction over geological time. We discuss a number of models which …, rather than dealing with the direct causes of particular extinction events, attempt to predict overall statistical trends …