CONCEPT
Island Biogeography
Wilson and MacArthur's 1967 theory explaining species diversity on islands as a function of <em>immigration rate and extinction rate</em> — the mathematical framework that turns out to describe the SaaS collapse with unexpected precision.
The Theory of Island Biogeography, developed by Wilson and Robert MacArthur in the 1960s, models the equilibrium number of species on an island as determined by the balance between two rates: the rate of immigration (new species arriving) and the rate of extinction (existing species disappearing). When immigration exceeds extinction, diversity increases. When extinction exceeds immigration, diversity decreases. The theory's power is that it reduces the extraordinary complexity of ecological dynamics to the interaction of two measurable rates, producing testable predictions that have been verified across decades of subsequent empirical work.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The theory was developed in the context of Caribbean herpetology — lizards on islands. Wilson and MacArthur predicted that larger islands would support more species (because extinction rates would be lower on larger habitats) and that islands closer to the mainland would support more species (because immigration rates would be higher). Both predictions were confirmed across hundreds of islands and thousands of species. The theory
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