SEX SELLS, SEX CELLS & 2 BODY PROBLEMS

BEFORE YOU GET THE WHOLE TRUTHYOU HAVE TO GET THE HALF TRUTH

Uneven distributions of wealth & abundance: Is the world

unfair in the same way everywhere all the time?

Was Zeno of Elea

incontinent?

Tips for dancing your PhD:

#1. OWN THAT SH*T

What’s in the stars for you?

Art class for Scientists?

Inaugural Issue

Relativized rank

The uneven nurture of nature

Ken Locey

For Gavin

Inaugural Article

(self-reviewed and self-re

ferential)

Distributions of wealth and abundance (DOWs; below) are super important to everything, everywhere, all the time. They reveal the disparity between the haves and the have nots, which is the statistical signature that someone or some thing is getting the short end of the stick. Increasingly uneven DOWs are telltale signs of impending economic instability. In ecology, predicting the shape of the DOW is the first sign that a theory of biodiversity might not be total codswallopy baloney.

“Supreme importance attaches to one economic problem, that of the distribution of wealth. Is there a natural law according to which the income of society is divided? If so, what is the law?” – John Bates Clark (1899)

Relativized rank

Methods: If you think I developed Python scripts just for this, you’re crazy. Anyway, I used some not so highfalutin coding to select random samples of approximately lots of DOWs from microbial, macrobial, and social/economic datasets (includes DOWs from sports, governments, stocks, and the distribution of supply, use, waste, and production of various resources and commodities)…I then decided to go WAY overboard in tangentially replying to a string of ‘tweets’ led by Gavin Simpson. Specifically, in making this document.

Results: Below are plots of kernel density curves, which are sort of like smoothed out histograms but not really, for Smith and Wilson’s evenness index, Simpson’s Diversity and Evenness indices, and the Berger-Parker index which is just the relative abundance or wealth of the most abundant species, the wealthiest country, etc. In terms of evenness, microbial DOWs seem more like economic ones than they do macrobial DOWs. The ones on the right darn near completely overlap, so…

Results cont’d:Below are scatter plots where each dot represents the value of evenness, diversity, or dominance for a single DOW. Microbial and macrobial data seem to follow a more distinct relationship to total abundance N (the sum of all elements in a single DOW) than the socioeconomic datasets. Regardless, bigger N leads to lower evenness…except for the vertical column of economic data points at around N = 104. Look, it’s raining data

Relationships of the Berger-Parker index (relative abundance or wealth of the most abundant or wealthy group) and Simpson’s diversity to total abundance are incredibly strong in their amorphous stippled pattern.

Results continued: Here, the left plot looks like hocus-pocus. But it’s also ranging across 10 orders of magnitude in log-log space. So yeah, okay, it is hocus pocus. Apparently, the wealth or abundance of the most wealthy or abundant thing scales strongly and linearly with a 1-to-1 relationship to total abundance or wealth. I mean, really? This is pretty ridiculous.

The relationship to richness for microbes and macrobes looks sort of compelling, which makes sense because the number of species generally increases with the number of individuals (e.g. collector’s curves). Of course, the social and economic data have to be all complex and dramatic, and just ruin the whole thing.

Conclusion (tentative): 1.) Accounting for total wealth

or abundance (N) explains the apparent greater similarities in evenness between microbes and non-ecological distributions of wealth than between microbes and macrobes, i.e., greater N leads to lesser evenness. Microbes and macrobes fill out a pattern that social/economic distributions more greatly vary from, 2.) Apparent similarities in dominance are due to a strong linear relationship of the most abundant rank to N. There are no striking differences between these disparate data compilations.3.) It is risky to make a statement about patterns of abundance and diversity without accounting for N.There are 19 more orders of magnitude in N to consider!

Ecologist—It’s your lucky week and the year of the horse. Invert your

chi and express your inner social butterfly-horse…Pegasus?

Physicist—Feeling lonely? Gravity weighing you down? Does the

universe feel like it’s full of dark matter? Well, you’re close. Sorry.

Mathematician—Solitary numbers, lonely runner conjectures,

incompleteness theorems? Your heart chakra is brown noise.

Computer Scientist—Need a challenge? Try simulating artificial

willful ignorance.

Psychologist—pass.

Climate scientist—Folks are starting to notice you. I predict this next

week will be warmer than usual, so tonight, wear something sexy.

Statistician—You’ll never be more likely to be as likely of being more

likely as you are right now (p < 0.01). Take the bull by the horns.

Philosopher—Relax, the work week is nearly half over. All you have

to do, to finish out the other half, is to finish out half of that, and

then half of that…crap.

Numerologist—The moon’s waning crescent reveals a dwindling

chance of winning the lotto. Play before the new moon. Your lucky

number is 23 or any set of numbers that multiply, add, subtract, or

divide to yield 23.