Concept · Systems Thinking
Power Laws
Origin: Zipf / Pareto / complexity
Biological Parallel
Zipf observed that in any corpus, a few words dominate usage. Pareto noted that 20% of people own 80% of wealth. Power laws appear throughout biology: species abundance (few abundant, many rare), metabolic rates, tree sizes, extinction event frequencies. These aren't coincidences—they emerge from preferential attachment, multiplicative growth, and self-organized criticality. Ecosystems naturally generate power law distributions; they're the mathematical signature of complex adaptive systems.