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RAUP 'S REAL EXTINCTION DATA FROM THE PHANEROZOIC



He divided the Phanerozoic into 77 periods of about 7 million years each. For each interval, data was assembled for the number of families that went extinct. What he found were many small extinctions and few large ones .








As can be seen , it is not quite a power law distribution (i.e. a straight line of negative slope),
but it is very close. 77 data points is probably too few and thus not extremely accurate. Therefore, a strong clue ,but not proof, exists in the rock record to represent self-organized criticality
and thus complex behaviour in biological evolutionary processes.


Complexity studies at Carleton University
Complexity index