  The widespread occurrence of an inverse square relation in the hierarchical
distribution of sub-communities within communities (or sub-species within
species) has been recently invoked as a signature of hierarchical
self-organization within social and ecological systems. Here we show that,
whether such systems are self-organized or not, this behavior is the
consequence of the tree-like classification method. Different tree-like
classifications (both of real and truly random systems) display a similar
statistical behaviour when considering the sizes of their sub-branches.
