Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 379

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 3 of the 3 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Rate of Morphological Evolution in Mammals from the Standpoint of the Neutral Expectation

Lynch, Michael·1990·The American Naturalist
DOI 10.1086/285128
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

A comparison of the evolutionary rates of cranial morphology in mammals with the neutral expectation suggests that stabilizing selection is a predominant evolutionary force keeping the long-term diversification of lineages well below its potential. The rate of morphological divergence of almost all lineages, including the great apes, is substantially below the minimum neutral expectation. The divergence of the modern races of man is slightly above the minimum neutral rate but well below the maximum rate. Therefore, there is no need to invoke extraordinary mutational mechanisms, such as regulatory gene evolution, to explain what has been perceived as rapid morphological evolution in mammals. Nor does it appear that behavioral drive needs to be invoked to explain rapid morphological evolution in hominoids. Outside of man, the long-term rate of phenotypic evolution in the great apes is actually lower than that for other mammals. The data suggest that, immediately after reproductive isolation, most lineages diverge morphologically at approximately the neutral rate and that this rate declines over evolutionary time. Such a pattern is consistent with a broad class of phenotypic evolutionary models that invoke an interaction between the forces of random genetic drift, polygenic mutation, and stabilizing selection. This pattern also suggests that the apparently rapid rates of morphological evolution in modern man relative to other mammals and in mammals relative to other vertebrates are artifacts of temporal scaling.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/285128

Cites

3 of 3 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 3 references

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
Lynch, M.
Venue
The American Naturalist
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Published
1990-12
Volume
136
Issue
6
Pages
727-741
ISSN
  • 0003-0147 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5323
DOI
10.1086/285128
OpenAlex
W1991100961
Cited by
379
References
3
FWCI
3.82
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.