Figure 4. Conservation of small-world architecture.

Clustering coefficient vs. characteristic path length normalized relative to a set of 1000 randomly rewired graphs that preserve the degree sequence of the nodes (Maslov and Sneppen, 2002). For definitions of each graph measure, see ‘Materials and methods.’ Each data point represents a different animal species. Data points above the identity line are said to have small-world architecture. The inset on the right bottom corner is a zoom on the abscissa; dots correspond to the median and error bars correspond to the standard deviation across species within the same taxonomic order.