DID Charles Darwin get it wrong? A thought-provoking theory suggests that natural selection may not be evolution’s main driver after all. Instead, evolution and extinction may be controlled by an internal clock in every species.
Almost all the species that ever lived have become extinct. Mass extinction events account for only 4 per cent of this total, so what snuffed out the rest?
Reinhard Stindl of the Institute of Medical Biology in Vienna, Austria, is proposing that the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, called telomeres, act like a timer, eroding slowly with each generation and inexorably counting the…
