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Daughter of time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2016

Andrew H. Knoll
Andrew H. Knoll*
Affiliation:
Botanical Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
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Extract

Truth, goes an old proverb, is the daughter of time. Fifty years ago, G. G. Simpson (1944) brought paleontology into the Neodarwinian fold, arguing that evolutionary tempo can be documented in the geological record and used to inform debate about evolutionary mode. Today, increasingly sophisticated paleontological investigations of rate—be it diversification, extinction, migration, morphological change, or divergence in macromolecular sequence—require calibration of the geological time scale with a precision far greater than Simpson could have anticipated. Expanding research on the relationships between environmental history and evolution also requires unprecedented resolution in correlation and geochronometry.

Type
Matters of the Record
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , Winter 1996 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

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