Critically important to ecology, evolutionary biology, and paleobiology is the problem of scale, that is, the idea that spatial and temporal scales of observation determine the patterns that emerge from the data. The number of trilobite species in a particular Paleozoic deposit, for example, may fluctuate in a directionless manner over short geological intervals, belying a long-term, global diversity trend. If the apparently random fluctuations observed on small spatiotemporal scales are mere noise within larger-scale, deterministic patterns, data cannot be scaled up from real-time ecological observations to predict patterns in the fossil record. If, however, at least some patterns and processes are scale independent, ecology has the potential to predict macroevolutionary dynamics.