Enforced Symmetry: The Necessity of Symmetric Waxing and Waning

This paper demonstrates that the symmetric waxing and waning pat-terns that can be observed in ecological measures such as occupancy and geographic range are created by averaging, rescaling, conditioning and combining different sources of information. Therefore symmetric waxing and waning from the origination of a taxon to the extinction of a taxon in any measure should be treated as the null hypothesis and non-informative.