“…However, it has been demonstrated that some of the patterns are not unique to ecological and evolutionary systems, and often emerge in other complex systems (Gaston et al 1993, Mace and Pagel 1995, Bettencourt et al 2007, Nekola and Brown 2007, Warren et al 2011, Blonder et al 2014, Scheffer et al 2017). Examples are: species-abundance distributions of music festival setlists (Nekola and Brown 2007) and basketball wins by a team (Warren et al 2011), frequency distributions of components of software (Pang and Maslov 2013), latitudinal gradients of language diversity (Mace and Pagel 1995), species-area relationships in corporations, industrial codes, and minerals (Blonder et al 2014), and diversification slowdowns in American automobiles (Gjesfjeld et al 2016). To explain such conspicuous universality, theories have been proposed that predict the patterns across different systems for pure statistical reasons, given that the systems share structural constraints (Frank 2009, Sizling et al 2009, Harte 2011, Blonder et al 2014.…”