We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species
occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a
fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a
death event then the type that is killed is the one with the smallest fitness.
We show that there is a sharp phase transition when the birth probability is
larger than the death probability. The set of species with fitness higher than
a certain critical value approach an uniform distribution. On the other hand
all the species with fitness less than the critical disappear after a finite
(random) time.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, TeX, Added references, To appear in Markov
Processes and Related Field