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Speciation Rates

Speciation Rates

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The genomes of eukaryotes are punctuated by long stretches of sequence which do not code for proteins or RNAs. Although some of these regions do contain crucial regulatory sequences, the vast majority of this DNA serves no known function. Typically, these regions of the genome are the ones in which the fastest change, in evolutionary terms, is observed, because there is typically little to no selection pressure acting on these regions to preserve their sequences.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 14, 2026

Daily Transfers, Archiving Populations, and Measuring Fitness in the Long-Term Evolution Experiment with Escherichia coli

Daily Transfers, Archiving Populations, and Measuring Fitness in the Long-Term Evolution Experiment with Escherichia coli

Published on: August 18, 2023

Revisiting evolutionary rate-time relationships.

Stephen P De Lisle¹, Erik I Svensson²

¹Department of Environmental and Life Science, Karlstad University, Universitetsgatan 2, 651 88, Karlstad, Sweden.

Evolution; International Journal of Organic Evolution

|October 22, 2025

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Evolutionary rates often appear to slow down over time, but this is usually an artifact of how rates are calculated. True evolutionary rate-time relationships are difficult to interpret and often unrelated to time itself.

Keywords:

evolutionary rate macroevolution microevolution stasis paradox

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Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations

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Published on: February 3, 2023

Area of Science:

Evolutionary biology
Quantitative biology

Background:

Evolutionary rates (molecular, phenotypic, lineage) often show negative scaling with measurement time.
This temporal scaling has raised questions about the time-dependency of evolutionary processes.

Purpose of the Study:

To revisit challenges in interpreting rate-time relationships in evolutionary biology.
To investigate the inevitability and interpretation of negative rate-time scaling.

Main Methods:

Simulations of evolutionary processes under constant rates.
Reanalysis of six empirical evolutionary datasets.
Break-point regression to test for modes of evolutionary change across timescales.

Main Results:

Negative rate-time scaling is often an artifact of plotting ratios against time.
Simulations show constant rates readily produce negative scaling.
Empirical data show evolutionary magnitudes are often time-unrelated; >99% of rate-time variation explained by time alone.
No strong support found for a hypothesis of three distinct evolutionary modes across timescales.

Conclusions:

Negative rate-time relationships are largely inevitable and difficult to interpret.
Assessing the accumulation of evolutionary change over time is more straightforward than interpreting rate-time scaling.