A food-web based unified model of"macro"- and"micro-"evolution

We incorporate the generic hierarchical architecture of foodwebs into a “unified” model that describes both “micro” and “macro” evolutions within a single theoretical framework. This model describes the “micro”-evolution in detail by accounting for the birth, ageing and natural death of individual organisms as well as prey-predator interactions on a hierarchical dynamic food web. It also provides a natural description of random mutations and speciation/orgination of species as well as their extinctions. The distribution of lifetimes of species follows an approximate power law only over a limited regime.