Do Earthquakes Exhibit Self-Organized Criticality?

If earthquakes are phenomena of self-organized criticality (SOC), statistical characteristics of the earthquake time series should be invariant after the sequence of events in an earthquake catalog are randomly rearranged. In this Letter we argue that earthquakes are unlikely phenomena of SOC because our analysis of the Southern California Earthquake Catalog shows that the first-return-time probability PM(T) is apparently changed after the time series is rearranged. This suggests that the SOC theory should not be used to oppose the efforts of earthquake prediction.