Their prediction of a town was based on a geographical theory called "island biogeography": basically, that a species on a large island is much less likely to go extinct following a catastrophic event than a species on a small one.
There is not much more an airline can do following a catastrophic event; it can, however, do much less, as illustrated by Malaysia Airlines' confused, contradictory and altogether insensitive handling of the Flight 370 disappearance.
Few empirical studies, however, have specifically linked evolutionary and metapopulation theory to evaluate the eco-evolutionary dynamics associated with selection against migrants (Hanski and Saccheri 2006; Duckworth and Badyaev 2007; Moore and Hendry 2009), much less the role of such dynamics in population recovery from catastrophic population disturbance.
And the kind of independence he might eventually seek could be much less of a break-up than many now imagine.The result is certainly catastrophic for his unionist opponents.
The question is why a writer of almost Proustian gifts has so much less than Proustian achievements; and the answer may rest in a certain catastrophic form of Englishness, in the cult of the little, the diminutive, and the unambitious, a dread of pretension raised to an aesthetic principle.
After two scarcely believable days of Test cricket, punctuated by catastrophic collapses and a dream debut, Friday's play was much less frenzied.
If France were suddenly deprived of 3,000 leading scientists, engineers, bankers, painters, poets, and writers, he argued, the result would be catastrophic, but if all the courtiers and bishops and 10,000 landowners vanished, the loss, though deplorable, would be much less severe.
Much, much, much, much less perfect.
