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For Coopers & Cladistics this week Mike Crisp is away, so I will be leading a discussion of phylogenetic dating methods, especially new methods where dated fossils are included as tips in the tree, along with DNA data for living species.

I think a good introduction to this is this very new review article:

Mario dos Reis, Philip C. J. Donoghue and Ziheng Yang (2016). Bayesian molecular clock dating of species divergences in the genomics era. Nature Reviews Genetics, 17, 71-80. doi: 10.1038/nrg.2015.8

Five decades have passed since the proposal of the molecular clock hypothesis, which states that the rate of evolution at the molecular level is constant through time and among species.

This hypothesis has become a powerful tool in evolutionary biology, making it possible to use molecular sequences to estimate the geological ages of species divergence events.

With recent advances in Bayesian clock dating methodology and the explosive accumulation of genetic sequence data, molecular clock dating has found widespread applications, from tracking virus pandemics and studying the macroevolutionary process of speciation and extinction to estimating a timescale for life on Earth.

Meet at University House in the cellar bar area.

Coopers and Cladistics is a long-running evolutionary biology discussion group held every second Thursday at University House, ANU. Please contact Mike Crisp if you would like to be included on the C&C email list.