The importance of recent ice ages in speciation: A failed paradigm

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-1997

Publication Title

Science

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Volume

277

Issue

5332

First page number:

1666

Last page number:

1669

Abstract

Late Pleistocene glaciations have been ascribed a dominant role in sculpting present-day diversity and distributions of North American vertebrates. Molecular comparisons of recently diverged sister species now permit a test of this assertion. The Late Pleistocene Origins model predicts a mitochondrial DNA divergence value of less than 0.5 percent for avian sister species of Late Pleistocene origin. Instead, the average mitochondrial DNA sequence divergence for 35 such songbird species pairs is 5.1 percent, which exceeds the predicted value by a factor of 10. Molecular data suggest a relatively protracted history of speciation events among North American songbirds over the past 5 million years.

Keywords

Birds--Speciation; Molecular genetics; Phylogeography; Songbirds

Controlled Subject

Birds--Speciation; Molecular genetics

Disciplines

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Molecular Genetics | Ornithology

File Format

ppt

File Size

434 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/

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