Noise leads to the perceived increase in evolutionary rates over short time scales.

ABSTRACT: Across a variety of biological datasets, from genomes to conservation to the fossil record, evolutionary rates appear to increase toward the present or over short time scales. This has long been seen as an indication of processes operating differently at different time scales, even potentially as an indicator of a need for new theory connecting macroevolution and microevolution. Here we introduce a set of models that assess the relationship between rate and time and demonstrate that these patterns are statistical artifacts of time-independent errors present across ecological and evolutionary datasets, which produce hyperbolic patterns of rates through time. We show that plotting a noisy numerator divided by time versus time leads to the observed hyperbolic pattern; in fact, randomizing the

SUBMITTER: O'Meara BC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11424004 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature