Abstract
One of the most fascinating phenomena in evolutionary biology is the rapid evolution of genes with conserved functions across the tree of life. Because the cellular and organismal development processes are highly conserved across eukaryotes, a naive evolutionary expectation is that the genes involved in those processes would also be under high selective constraint and evolve extremely slowly. However, we now know that evolutionarily young genes can rapidly acquire crucial viability functions and even evolutionarily old genes can have unexpected levels of rapid evolution within specific lineages (Talbert et al. 2004). These studies have led to novel insights of function and evolution in molecular systems that are universally important for almost all organisms. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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