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Unity and diversity - New insights into the origin of species suggest that biologists disagree less than they thought they did

Many physicists are engaged in the search for a "theory of everything". Biologists think they have found one already. Organisms that survive long enough to reproduce and are attractive enough to find a mate pass their genes on to the next generation. Those that do not are evolutionary cul-de-sacs. Prof. Mark Pagel reasoned that the theory of punctuated equilibria (the formal name given to evolution in bursts) predicts a relation between the rate at which new species are formed and the rate of genetic change in an organism's recent past.