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In the late 1960s it was proposed that at the molecular level most evolutionary changes are selectively "neutral," meaning that they are due to genetic drift rather than to natural selection.
The neutral theory of molecular evolution proposed that most evolutionary changes are the result of the fixation of neutral mutations by genetic drift.
In the 1970s Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium which holds that stasis is the most prominent feature of the fossil record, and that most evolutionary changes occur rapidly over relatively short periods of time.
Early observations of low levels of protein divergence between humans and chimpanzees have suggested that most evolutionary changes in the human lineage have occurred at the regulation level [1].
Therefore, if most evolutionary changes in the mRNA abundance can be explained by the neutral hypothesis, then the above two mentioned phenomena, namely the clock-like accumulation of gene expression divergence and Zipf's law of the transcriptome, should be explained with the same neutral model.
Most evolutionary changes resulting in amino acid substitutions are conservative and maintain the stability of the protein, as structure is more conserved than sequence (Illergård et al., 2009).
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Is it true that most evolutionary change is actually tied up with relatively brief and infrequent episodes of speciation?
This opinion was increasingly accepted, and even Haldane affirmed that "most evolutionary change has been degenerative" (Haldane 1932).
However, if it turned out that most evolutionary change could be explained without recourse to natural selection, this would be grounds for arguing that evolutionary biology was no longer Darwinian.
The study argues that most evolutionary change results from the formation of new species, and not from gradual change within species, but it has rankled some researchers who question its approach.
It states that random genetic drift, rather than natural selection, governs most evolutionary change at the level of the DNA and proteins, while admitting that natural selection predominates in shaping the morphological and physiological traits that manifest an adaptive fit with the environment.
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