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Notes -
I'd imagine it's subject to diminishing returns. Once something has lasted a certain length of time, that means that it's immune to most of the forces that it's possible to become immune to. Lasting longer than that doesn't make it immune to more forces.
If something even counts as a species, it's been around long enough for that to happen, so I wouldn't expect length of species existence to be correlated with survival.
The corresponding idea for causes would be something like "people have built ships for much longer than they have been Catholics, but shipbuilding and Catholicism are equally likely to survive". This may or may not be true but it's at least plausible. But that doesn't extend to things that have been around for short enough periods of time that diminishing returns haven't set in. It still makes sense to say "shipbuilding has been around a lot longer than Communism, so it'll probably last longer".
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