Supplementary section 11.1: Calibration

Further reading

One area of biology where calibration is the subject of intensive research effort is in evolutionary studies based on genotypic variation. For example, if we compare the genomes of humans and chimpanzees then we can make inferences about how long ago our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee lived. There are a great many other questions in biogeography, speciation, conservation genetics, and population biology that can be explored by looking at genetic variation within and between populations. However, all these methods require some way to calibrate how rates of genetic change can be converted to real time. A useful introduction to this issue can be found in:

Ho SYW, Saarma U, Barnett R, Haile J & Shapiro B (2008) The effects of inappropriate calibration: three case studies in molecular ecology. Plos One, 3(2), e1615.