From Tim Walshaw
Bob Holmes reports on evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel’s theory that speciation is best explained as a consequence of single accidental events rather than by the gradual changes caused by natural selection (13 March, p 30).
This resonates with Nassim Taleb’s suggestion in his book The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable (reviewed 7 April 2007, p 52) that the structure of modern society is due to the impact of sudden extreme events, from the cause of the first world war to the creation of the internet. Taleb also suggests that the Gaussian normal curve, the recognisable bell-shaped graph used to represent normal distribution, should be replaced by fractal representations that work on the basis of power law distributions of events, which is a far better statistical measure for both science and economics.
Canberra, ACT, Australia
