Old taxa on young islands: a critique of the use of island age to date island-endemic clades and calibrate phylogenies.

摘要

Donoghue and Benton (2007) wrote that: “directly or indirectly, all molecular clock analyses rely on paleontological data for calibration . molecular clocks require fossil calibration” (p. 424). Although countless textbooks portray the time course of evolution with reference to the fossil record, many modern clock studies, including most of those discussed below, do not use fossils at all. Forest (2009) wrote “There is general consensus that the fossil record provides by far the best information with which to transform relative time estimates into absolute ages” (p. 790). But the authors who have calibrated molecular phylogenies using tectonics and island age instead of fossils have all accepted that these alternative methods provide better means of calibrating the time course of evolution than the fossil record does.