Widespread occurrence of the inverse square distribution in social sciences and taxonomy

The study showed that the presence of an inverse square law relation for the distribution of the sizes of communities and species does not mark any significance organization within the system under consideration. It was shown that it rather was an inevitable consequence of the classification scheme. It was pointed out that such power-law behavior was expected whenever the classification scheme used to organize a set of data was based on the construction of a hierarchical tree. It was suggested that the degree of correlation and organization of the system under study should be tied to the quality of scaling rather than to its bare presence.