Current Status of the Molecular Clock Hypothesis

changing field with new developments almost from day to day. One interesting hypothesis that has come from our ability to sequence proteins and/or genes is that of the molecular clock. This hypothesis postulates that the rate of evolution in a macromolecule measured by changes in amino acid sequences and more recently by nucleotide sequences is roughly constant overtime. If this hypothesis was valid across all taxa it would be a valuable tool for estimating divergence times as well as validating phylogenetic relationships (Doolittle, et al., 1996).

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