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Evolution Can Occur Much Faster Than Previously Thought

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: October 28th, 2015, 8:00pm UTC

An anonymous reader writes: An Oxford study on chickens discovered that evolution can make significant changes to a genome in as little as 15 years. "For a long time scientists have believed that the rate of change in the mitochondrial genome was never faster than about 2% per million years. The identification of these mutations shows that the rate of evolution in this pedigree is in fact 15 times faster." Professor Greger Larson, senior author on the study, said, "Our observations reveal that evolution is always moving quickly but we tend not to see it because we typically measure it over longer time periods."pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Evolution+Can+Occur+Much+Faster+Than+Previously+Thought%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1GKyJtO"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F10%2F28%2F2040232%2Fevolution-can-occur-much-faster-than-previously-thought%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/28/2040232/evolution-can-occur-much-faster-than-previously-thought?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/28/2040232/evolution-can-occur-much-faster-than-previously-thought?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/Lx31xS0vxek" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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