Abstract
In the early 1960s, researchers noticed that the number of differences between amino acid sequences varied roughly linearly with the time of divergence between the species from which the amino acid sequences were sampled (Margoliash, 1963; Zuckerkandl and Pauling, 1962, 1965). This seminal observation led to the formulation of the “molecular clock” hypothesis (Zuckerkandl and Pauling, 1965), which asserts that change at the molecular level occurs regularly through time. An important corollary prediction of the molecular clock hypothesis is that rates of molecular evolution are equal among diverse evolutionary lineages.
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Gaut, B.S. (1998). Molecular Clocks and Nucleotide Substitution Rates in Higher Plants. In: Hecht, M.K., Macintyre, R.J., Clegg, M.T. (eds) Evolutionary Biology. Evolutionary Biology, vol 30. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1751-5_4
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