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 the genome:
This result arises analytically from the properties of coalescing
random walks. Since the results are essentially the same for
both the spatial and mean field (well-mixed) version, here is
the result for the well-mixed version:
