Pleistocene speciation and the mitochondrial DNA clock: A response to Arbogast and Slowinski
Document Type
Response or Comment
Publication Date
12-1998
Publication Title
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Volume
282
Issue
5396
First page number:
1955
Last page number:
1955
Abstract
In our report, we challenged the conventional notion that a previously defined set of North American songbird (order Passeriformes) species pairs originated as a consequence of being isolated during the last one [100,000 years before the present (B.P.)] or two (250,000 years B.P.) cycles of North American glaciations. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence divergences calculated for 35 such pairs of sister species differed on average by 5.1%. This value is an order of magnitude greater than the amount of divergence expected of species that originated within the last 250,000 years (the Late Pleistocene as we defined it). On this basis, and two other lines of evidence, we rejected the prevailing model of “Late Pleistocene Origins” (LPO) for this particular group of birds. We are gratified that Arbogast and Slowinski's “reanalysis” supports our main conclusion. Even accepting their recalibration, for the moment, 19 of the 21 (90%) species pairs that they examined diverged over 1 million years ago [figure 1 (bottom) of the comment]. There are, however, problems with their analysis.
Keywords
Birds--Speciation; Divergence (Biology); Molecular genetics; Phylogeography; Songbirds
Controlled Subject
Birds--Speciation; Molecular genetics; Pleistocene Geologic Epoch
Disciplines
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Molecular Genetics | Ornithology
File Format
File Size
270 KB
Language
English
Permissions
Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or use interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the article. Publisher copyright policy allows author to archive post-print (author’s final manuscript). When post-print is available or publisher policy changes, the article will be deposited.
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Repository Citation
Klicka, J.,
Zink, R. M.
(1998).
Pleistocene speciation and the mitochondrial DNA clock: A response to Arbogast and Slowinski.
Science, 282(5396),
1955-1955.
Available at: