Thanks Genomicus for an excellent topic that I have been interested in for some time. Hopefully I can tweak it back to your topic ...
Particularly appropriate as I am reading a book gleaned from my dads library when we sold the old mansion ...
An Introduction to Population EcologyG. Evelyn Hutchinson
New Haven and London
Yale Press 1978
I'm through chapter 1 so far, and I ran across this section:
F.E.Smith was my dad, and I remember visiting his office at UofM and seeing the tanks of daphnia. This paper was published in 1963, so I was still in High School. Several of the other references involve people we knew (Larry Slobodkin for example parties and annual department picnics. Another paper dad did with Larry is "Why the Earth is Green" ... good times.
My point here is that population biology\ecology deals with mechanics of growth\spread and limitations on that growth\spread in the population.
I have also been considering species as individual units for evolution in ecologies, and these 'logistic' type curves would also be applicable to species diversity in a specific ecology. When an extinction event causes an vacancy in an ecology the number of species would diversify rapidly and first and then slow down until they reach an equilibrium number of species that fill the niches. Island biogeography also comes back to this with a limitation on the number of species that can exist within a specific ecology. This also brings in the "Why the Earth is Green" paper.
Enjoy