DIVERSITY IS UNEVENLY DISTRIBUTED WITHIN SPECIES

The key result is that uniqueness has a power law distribution:

This implies that a small fraction of a population is responsible for a disproportionate fraction of the diversity (see 'implications for conservation').

Inheritance from multiple parents (e.g. sexual reproduction) changes the distribution somewhat, but it is still a power law. Here g is the number of separately inherited parts of hte genome:

This result arises analytically from the properties of coalescing random walks:

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