A molecular clock estimates time since divergence based on
- A
The cumulative number of morphological differences observed between living species and fossil ancestors
- B
The proportion of shared protein structures between distantly related taxa across major animal phyla
- C
The geographic distance separating two populations of a single ancestral species over evolutionary time
- Dcheck_circle
The roughly constant rate of accumulation of (mostly neutral) mutations in some genes
Explanation
Mutation rate is approximately constant in many genes, so DNA differences between species are proportional to divergence time (calibrated against fossils).