Nine out of 10 species, including humans, came into being 100,000-200,000 years ago
Paris — Who would have suspected that a handheld genetic test used to unmask sushi bars pawning off tilapia for tuna could deliver deep insights into evolution, including how new species emerge? And who would have thought to trawl through five-million of these gene snapshots — called DNA barcodes — collected from 100,000 animal species by hundreds of researchers around the world and deposited in the US government-run GenBank database? That would be Mark Stoeckle from The Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who together published findings last week sure to jostle, if not overturn, more than one settled idea about how evolution unfolds. It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations — think ants, rats, humans — will become more genetically diverse over time. But is that true? "The answer is no," said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution. For the plane...
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