Self-organized criticality in an asexual model?

Recent work has shown that the distribution of steady state mutations for a n asexual "bacteria" model has features similar to that seen in Self-Organi zed Critical (SOC) sandpile model of Bak et al. We investigate this coincid ence further and search for "self-organized critical" state for bacteria bu t instead find that the SOC sandpile critical behavior is very sensitive; c ritical behavior is destroyed with small perturbations effectively when the absorption of sand is introduced. It is only in the limit when the length of the genome of the bacteria tends to infinity that SOC properties are rec overed for the asexual model.