Sensitivity to Initial Conditions and Nonextensivity in Biological Evolution

Abstract

We consider biological evolution as described within the Bak and Sneppen 1993 model. We exhibit, at the self-organized critical state, a power-law sensitivity to the initial conditions, calculate the associated exponent, and relate it to the recently introduced nonextensive thermostatistics. The scenario which here emerges without tuning strongly reminds that of the tuned onset of chaos in say logistic-like onedimensional maps. We also calculate the dynamical exponent z.