"People evolve at different rates and you have to think laterally and be flexible".
But it's not that simple: overall similarity is an unreliable guide to genealogical relationship because different lineages evolve at different rates.
Within each organism are thousands of genes and proteins; these evolve at different rates, but every one of them reflects the same evolutionary events.
They said species evolve at different rates — sometimes gradually, sometimes rapidly, sometimes remaining unchanged for eons — and that this has nothing to do with whether they share a common ancestor.
In short, Riedl recognized that morphological characters evolve at different rates.
Their results indicate that genes evolve at different rates and that these rates correspond to the hierarchical module in which genes are found.
By using genes that evolve at different rates and rapidly improving statistical tools, the field of molecular phylogenetics is refining our understanding of how species are related to each other.
Brandley et al. [34] demonstrated that accommodating different rates of evolution among subsets of DNA data may improve divergence time estimation, especially when different subsets of the data evolve at different rates.
Viruses with similar ancestral lineages, e.g. the HK821-like viruses from China, evolve at different rates and in different ways in domestic poultry in northern compared to southern Vietnam, producing viruses that are genetically distant both within- and between-regions by 2007.
Germ cell-expressed genes and somatic cell-expressed genes evolve at different rates, and we speculate that the greater conservation of somatic factors would require a correspondingly greater conservation of target sites whereas more rapidly evolving germ cell factors might coevolve with rapidly changing regulatory sites.
