Random walks in the history of life.

The simplest null hypothesis for evolutionary time series is that the observed data follow a random walk. We examined whether aspects of Sepkoski's compilation of marine generic diversity depart from a random walk by using statistical tests from econometrics. Throughout most of the Phanerozoic, the random-walk null hypothesis is not rejected for marine diversity, accumulated origination or accumulated extinction, suggesting that either these variables were correlated with environmental variables that follow a random walk or so many mechanisms were affecting these variables, in different ways, that the resultant trends appear random. The only deviation from this pattern involves rejection of the null hypothesis for roughly the last 75 million years for the diversity and accumulated origination time series.