Abstract
The molecular evolutionary clock was proposed in the 1960s and has undergone considerable evolution over the past six decades. After arising from early studies of the amino acid sequences of proteins, the molecular clock became a point of contention between competing theories of molecular evolution. In this chapter, I describe the origins of the molecular clock hypothesis and the mixture of evidence that emerged throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including the discovery of departures from clocklike evolution in proteins and DNA. I review some of the broad patterns of evolutionary rate variation across the tree of life, including rates of spontaneous mutation and long-term evolution in viruses, bacteria, animals, and plants. With the remarkable growth of genomic data over the past two decades, the molecular clock is now primarily seen as a tool for reconstructing evolutionary timescales. In the final parts of this chapter, I summarize the key developments in molecular dating methods and describe how these approaches have been used to infer the timing of major evolutionary events.
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Ho, S.Y.W. (2020). The Molecular Clock and Evolutionary Rates Across the Tree of Life. In: Ho, S.Y.W. (eds) The Molecular Evolutionary Clock. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60181-2_1
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