Many credit punctuated equilibrium with promoting the flowering of the field of macroevolution, in which researchers study large-scale evolutionary changes, often in a geological time frame.
The work "demonstrates beautifully how necessary it is to look at the fossil record when testing hypotheses about … large-scale evolutionary changes," says Robert Sansom, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
In some cases, large-scale evolutionary changes in one direction (for example, the loss of a complex feature) are thought to be irreversible ("Dollo's Law"), which obviously would create a trend in one direction.
Clearly, large-scale evolutionary changes occurred in S4 after (or at) the Bacteria and Archaea divergence, and yet the signatures are unvarying within each domain.
Most studies have focused on large-scale evolutionary changes, such as the whole-genome duplication that occurred within the Saccharomyces complex of species (Wolfe and Shields 1997; Dietrich et al. 2004; Kellis et al. 2004; Scannell et al. 2006; Scannell et al. 2007b; Wapinski et al. 2007b).
Any genome wide screen for large-scale evolutionary change will enrich for false positives.
Can you flesh out how this kind of variation and genetic transfer can occur in populations and thus achieve large-scale evolutionary change?
This ability to change functional macrocircuitry of the brain through changes in gene expression in a single neuroblast reveals a surprising capacity for novel circuit formation in the brain and provides a paradigm for large-scale evolutionary modification of circuitry.
The occurrence, generality, and causes of large-scale evolutionary trends directional changes over long periods of time have been the subject of intensive study and debate in evolutionary science.
Not even the most ardent flat-earthers have a problem accepting small-scale evolutionary changes.
A large-scale evolutionary trend is a pattern of directional change occurring over long periods of time.
