What is the utility of molecular clocks?
The basic idea is that, with time, DNA accumulates mutations, and so although the rate of these mutations to accumulate is going to vary, if you can anchor some time points in evolution just by looking at the number of differences in mutations between one lineage and another, you may be able to compute when they had a common ancestor, and so on, so that’s the general idea of molecular clock but I’d not be the right person to give the expert answer on this. Have they added value to the study of fossils? I think that studying fossils has been extremely valuable, and studying molecular clocks has been extremely valuable but, there’s an additional arena that is just beginning to be studied, and that is to study the biology of humans in comparison with chimpanzees. The group at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University has suggested-in fact they’ve started a little center called the Living Link Center-with the idea that we’re all studying the quote, “missing link,” although there’s no s
