Noise leads to the perceived increase in evolutionary rates over short time scales

Interpretations of biodiversity patterns across timescales necessarily assume that fundamental processes of evolution do not change over time. While drift, selection, mutation, speciation may vary in magnitude, there is no need to postulate new mechanisms. A recurring pattern across a variety of biological datasets, from genomes to the fossil record, has shown evolutionary rates increasing toward the present or over shorter time scales, indicating potentially fundamental but unknown processes unifying evolutionary timescales. Here we introduce a set of novel models that assess the relationship between rate and time and demonstrate that these patterns are statistical artifacts of time-independent errors present across ecological and evolutionary datasets, which produce hyperbolic patterns of rates through time. Specifically, no matter how time-independent error and measurements of evolutionary change are distributed, estimated rates exhibit a hyperbolic pattern when plotted against time. Our findings are generally consistent with uniform rates over time but pose new challenges for the rate estimates foundational to other macroevolutionary models.