Eur. Phys. J. B 1, 545-548 (1998)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s100510050217

Sensitivity to initial conditions in the Bak-Sneppen model of biological evolution

¹ Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Ciudad Universitaria, 5000 Córdoba, Argentina
² Departamento de Fisica, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, 59072-970 Natal-RN, Brazil

Corresponding author: ^a cannas@fis.uncor.edu

Received: 5 November 1997
Revised: 11 November 1997
Accepted: 19 November 1997
Published online: 15 February 1998

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 of that of the tuned onset of chaos in say logistic-like one-dimensional maps. We also calculate the dynamical exponent z.