Evolution can happen much faster than thought: study

In a surprising discovery, Oxford scientists have found that evolution may take place much faster than believed, overturning the popular assumption that evolution is only visible over long time scales.
By studying individual chickens that were part of a long-term pedigree, the scientists led by Greger Larson at Oxford University's Research Laboratory for Archaeology in UK, found two mutations that had occurred in the mitochondrial genomes of the birds in only 50 years.
For a long time scientists have believed that the rate of change in the mitochondrial genome was never faster than about 2 per cent per million years.

The identification of these mutations shows that the rate of evolution in this pedigree is in fact 15 times faster.
In addition, by determining the genetic sequences along the pedigree, the team also discovered a single instance of mitochondrial DNA being passed down from a father.
This is a surprising discovery, showing that so-called 'paternal leakage' is not as rare as previously believed.

Using a well-documented 50-year pedigree of a population of White Plymouth Rock chickens developed at Virginia Tech in US by Paul Siegel, the researchers reconstructed how the mitochondrial DNA passed from mothers to daughters within the population.

They did this by analysing DNA from the blood samples of 12 chickens of the same generation using the most distantly related maternal lines, knowing that the base population had started from seven partially inbred lines.
A selective mating approach within the population started in 1957, resulting in what is now an over tenfold difference in the size of the chickens in the two groups when weighed at 56 days old.
"Our observations reveal that evolution is always moving quickly but we tend not to see it because we typically measure it over longer time periods," said Larson.
"Our study shows that evolution can move much faster in the short term than we had believed from fossil-based estimates," said Larson.

"Previously, estimates put the rate of change in a mitochondrial genome at about 2 per cent per million years. At this pace, we should not have been able to spot a single mutation in just 50 years, but in fact we spotted two," he said.
The study was published in the journal Biology Letters.