Scientists from Rockefeller University (New York) and the University of Basel in Switzerland have come to the conclusion that the genetic age of all existing animal species is almost the same, which contradicts the widespread idea of evolution. This was announced in a press release on Phys.org.
They analyzed the DNA barcode sequences. Barcoding (barcoding) DNA is a method of identifying an organism and its belonging to a particular taxon. Sections of mitochondrial DNA are used as barcodes, for example, the cytochrome c-oxidase I (COI) gene. It has been shown that COIs are grouped into clusters - groups of sequences closest to each other - which, with some exceptions, clearly correlate with species.
Scientists analyzed about five million COI sequences used for DNA barcoding and contained in the GenBank and BOLD databases. It turned out that the COI of one person differs from the sequence of another by no more than 0.1 percent. Approximately the same values (0.1-0.5 percent) are typical for other species. Moreover, the differences between species can reach five percent.
Such a picture should be observed if every species currently existing on Earth was finally formed at about the same time. It follows from this that genetic diversity does not depend on population size, but only on age.
One of the reasons for this distribution of variations in barcodes is a catastrophic event that reduced the genetic diversity of all species at once. However, scientists believe that the simpler explanation is that any existing population will always be relatively young. In other words, a species can only exist for a limited period of time before it disappears or gives rise to a new one.
