Understanding the timing of major evolutionary events is important, not only in itself, but critical also to our understanding of the tempo and implied mechanism of evolutionary change. A literal reading of the fossil record suggests that many of the major groups of complex organisms arose in an extremely short interval of time, around half a billion years ago. This has led to the suggestion that special mechanisms of evolutionary change must have operated at this time. However, mathematical models for evolutionary change at the level of base-substitution suggest that these evolutionary...
Understanding the timing of major evolutionary events is important, not only in itself, but critical also to our understanding of the tempo and implie...
