Islands of Stability, evolution: pre-registration (r1)

This deposit fixes, before anything is computed, a test of proposition 3 of Islands of Stability (islandsofstability.com) in the fossil record: for islands of the same depth, age says nothing about how long they have left. A marine genus is treated as an island. It appears, persists and goes extinct. Van Valen's law (1973) says its chance of extinction does not depend on its age. Finnegan, Payne and Wang (2008) found that chance falling with age in the Paleobiology Database, even with a genus's geographic range and species richness accounted for. This test re-runs their analysis on the database as downloaded on 30 September 2026, under rules fixed before the run, with range and richness standing in for depth. If the chance of extinction still falls with age when they are held fixed, the proposition is killed in this domain. Nothing in this deposit has been computed. Before the freeze only the occurrence file's structure was read: its columns, counts, coordinates, species names and dating precision. No relation between a genus's age and its extinction was computed or looked at. The test is not blind, since the published result is known. The bootstrap's random seed is the first 16 hexadecimal digits of the SHA-256 of this record's DOI. run_test.py requires the DOI and refuses to run unless every frozen file matches lock.json and both data files match their recorded SHA-256. Contents of bundle.zip (SHA256SUMS lists a hash for every file): replication/PREREGISTRATION.md: the frozen document (r1), also uploaded on its own. replication/PREREGISTRATION-draft.md is the draft (r0) the author approved, kept for the record. replication/lock.json and replication/freeze.py: the SHA-256 of every frozen file, and the check (python replication/freeze.py --verify). replication/finnegan.py and replication/run_test.py: the genera, the model and the runner (python replication/run_test.py --doi ). data/: the Paleobiology Database's occurrences and genera of the eight groups, unchanged, with SOURCE.md giving their queries, retrieval times and SHA-256 sums. replication/tests/: unit tests on made-up genera (python -m pytest -q replication/tests). The code and documents are under the Apache License 2.0. The data files keep the Paleobiology Database's CC BY 4.0 (credit: The Paleobiology Database and its contributors). Related: the pre-registration of the site's first instrument, snapshot 1 of the Map (10.5281/zenodo.22982434). Drafted with Claude (Anthropic), an AI assistant. Every decision recorded in the document was made by the author.