Bak–Sneppen model
Model of co-evolution between interacting species

The Bak–Sneppen model is a simple model of co-evolution between interacting species. It was developed to show how self-organized criticality may explain key features of the fossil record, such as the distribution of sizes of extinction events and the phenomenon of punctuated equilibrium. It is a minimalistic model, designed not so much to be an accurate model of evolutionary biology, as it is to show that bursty avalanche phenomena and intermittency seen in condensed matter physics can be applied in much broader settings, such as evolutionary biology. It is named after Per Bak and Kim Sneppen.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bak–Sneppen model” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.