"Because mutations start occurring at regular intervals in these genes as soon as a new species evolves - like the ticking of a clock - we can use them to trace the evolutionary history of a species back to its time of origin, " said Dr Hedges.
As genetic sequences come in from other species, evolutionary relationships that have been argued about for over a century will become obvious.
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The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.
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Two recent books take very different approaches to the narrative of bacteria and viruses, prions and protists that humanity has known for centuries and the brand new bugs that, by opportunistic accident, hop between species and start a new evolutionary tussle.
Two years ago another Harvard researcher, Tanya Smith, found that by the time we first faced our beetle-browed cousins, their childhoods were not only briefer than ours, they were shrinking possibly an evolutionary "effort" to continue the species by getting to childbearing age sooner.
Dispersed, cooperative knowledge works in economics as it does in evolutionary biology, to accelerate advancement of the human species.
"Presumably they're poorly equipped to hunt other animals, including their own species, so it's an evolutionary question as to why cannibalism still exists among non-carnivorous animals, " he said.
Other species apparently reckon that nasty tastes are a powerful evolutionary signal that something may be poisonous.
The best that evolutionary biologists can do is usually to point to groups of species that have plainly diversified recently, usually on a group of islands.
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Prof Benton said that the findings also showed that people involved in population management schemes, such as conserving endangered species etc, would have to take into account evolutionary factors, as well as ecological ones, as the result of environmental change.
Because the sounds of the most closely related apes matched most closely in the analysis of the laughter, the researchers believe the work is proof of laughter's shared evolutionary origin, followed by adaptation to its form in the species we see today.
This is particularly unfortunate for evolutionary psychologists, who are trying to find universal features of our species.
"Introduced species are one of the principal causes of endangerment for half of endangered species, " says Daniel Simberloff, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee.
If birds, as well as mammals, have personalities, it may make it easier to study the evolutionary pressures that give rise to such systematically different ways of behaving within a single species.
While fewer species live in the ocean than on land, marine life represents much older evolutionary lineages that are fundamental to our understanding of life on Earth, Appeltans says.
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