News Finding: Some stages of the biological changes during this period took about 30 million years, others took about 5-10 million years.
Paper Finding: Clades characterized by major phenotypic innovations often exhibit higher rates of evolution initially (e.g., [42]); if this pattern characterized most metazoan phyla, rates in the Cambrian would be uniformly elevated .
News Context: According to the experts, a moderate increase in rate of evolution explains how life made the jump from simple to complex systems, without contradicting Darwin's theory of evolution. Some stages of the biological changes during this period took about 30 million years, others took about 5-10 million years. "In this study we've estimated that rates of both morphological and genetic evolution during the Cambrian explosion were five times faster than today - quite rapid, but perfectly consistent with Darwin's theory of evolution," Lee said.
Paper Context: Typical directional selection can increase phenotypic evolutionary rates by orders of magnitude over short timescales , and even conserved genomic regions can exhibit 10-fold differences in evolutionary rates in living sister lineages . While this study examined only arthropods, the patterns found here may be general across other metazoan groups, though broader taxonomic studies are required. Clades characterized by major phenotypic innovations often exhibit higher rates of evolution initially (e.g., [42]); if this pattern characterized most metazoan phyla, rates in the Cambrian would be uniformly elevated .