Abstract
The widespread occurrence of an inverse square relation in the hierarchical distribution of subcommunities within communities (or subspecies within species) has been recently invoked as a signature of hierarchical self-organization within social and ecological systems. Here we show that, whether such systems are self-organized or not, this behavior is the consequence of the treelike classification method. Different treelike classifications (both of real and truly random systems) display a similar statistical behavior when considering the sizes of their sub-branches.
- Received 20 November 2003
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.69.035101
©2004 American Physical Society