ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Age-dependent extinction and the neutral theory of biodiversity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Survivorship Bias Explains Age-Dependent Extinction in Fossil Genera.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The fate of South America's endemic mammalian fauna in response to the most dramatic Cenozoic climate disruption.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Curve-fitting alone cannot validate neutral theory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Reply to Johnson: Holistic evaluation of ecological models in paleobiology.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Scaling approaches and macroecology provide a foundation for assessing ecological resilience in the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Biotic interactions and their consequences for macroevolution: learning from the fossil record and beyond.Paleobiology · 2008Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Red Queen (RQ) theory states that adaptation does not protect species from extinction because their competitors are continually adapting alongside them. RQ was founded on the apparent independence of extinction risk and fossil taxon age, but analytical developments have since demonstrated that age-dependent extinction is widespread, usually most intense among young species. Here, we develop ecological neutral theory as a general framework for modeling fossil species survivorship under incomplete sampling. We show that it provides an excellent fit to a high-resolution dataset of species durations for Paleozoic zooplankton and more broadly can account for age-dependent extinction seen throughout the fossil record. Unlike widely used alternative models, the neutral model has parameters with biological meaning, thereby generating testable hypotheses on changes in ancient ecosystems. The success of this approach suggests reinterpretations of mass extinctions and of scaling in eco-evolutionary systems. Intense extinction among young species does not necessarily refute RQ or require a special explanation but can instead be parsimoniously explained by neutral dynamics operating across species regardless of age.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.