Comment on "Self-organized criticality in living systems" by C. Adami

Abstract

Following extensive numerical experiments, it has been suggested that the evolution of competing computer programs in artificial life simulations shows signs of being a self-organized critical process. The primary evidence for this claim comes from the distribution of the lifetimes of species in the simulations, which appears to follow a power law. We argue that, for a number of reasons, it is unlikely that the system is in fact at a critical point and suggest an alternative explanation for the power-law lifetime distribution.