The remarkable discreteness of being

Abstract

Life is a discrete, stochastic phenomena : for a biological organism, the time of the two most important events of its life (reproduction and death) is random and these events change the number of individuals of the species by single units. These facts can have surprising, counter-intuitive consequences. I review here three examples where these facts play, or could play, important roles : the spatial distribution of species, the biodiversity and the (Darwinian) evolution of altruistic behavior.