The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

called “Some Statistics of Evolution and Geographical Distribution in Plants and Animals, and Their Significance.” Willis and Yule noted the presence in biology of the so-called power laws, tractable versions of the scalable randomness that I discussed in Chapter 3. These power laws (on which more technical information in the following chapters) had been noticed earlier by Vilfredo Pareto, who found that they applied to the distribution of income. Later, Yule presented a simple model showing how power laws can be generated. His point was as follows: Let’s say species split in two at some constant rate, so that new species arise. The richer in species a genus is, the richer it will tend to get, with the same logic as the Matthew effect. Note the following caveat: in Yule’s model the species never die out.