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The Sudden Surges That Forge Evolutionary Trees
An updated evolutionary model shows that living systems evolve in a split-and-hit-the-gas dynamic, where new lineages appear in sudden bursts rather than during a long marathon of gradual changes.
In the decades since, researchers have continued to debate these views as they’ve gathered more data: Paleontologists have accumulated fossil datasets tracing macroevolutionary changes in ancient lineages, while molecular biologists have reconstructed microevolution on a more compressed timescale — in DNA and the proteins they encode. The team went down a “rabbit hole,” Douglas said, to surface and assess any evidence in support of Eldredge and Gould’s theory — datasets on everything from the evolution of mammalian body size to Australasian parrots’ specialized digestive system for slurping nectar, to the early global spread of the virus behind the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the new model’s evolutionary spikes made the new trees 30% shorter with respect to gradual change, which suggested that less time had passed between the earliest ancestors and the tips of the branches, and that the enzymes had evolved more quickly.
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