Extinction has played a crucial role in shaping the ecosystems that we see on the earth today. This book gives a clear and self-contained introduction to mathematical models of the extinction process, including a summary of the important features of the fossil record and detailed discussions of many extinction models. The authors draw on ideas not only from paleontology, but from evolutionary biology, ecology, physics, and applied mathematics, including fitness landscapes, competitive exclusion, interaction matrices, and self-organized criticality.

About the Authors

Mark Newman received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Oxford in 1991, and is currently Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research interests include evolutionary theory and extinction, networks and graph theory, Monte Carlo simulation, and statistical physics.

Richard Palmer received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge in 1973, and is currently Professor of Physics, Computer Science, and Psychology and Brain Sciences at Duke University, and a member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. His research interests include biological extinction, glassy systems, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, graph theory, and financial markets.