Lecture 12: Phylogenies Flashcards
1
Q
What are systematics?
A
The classification of organisms to shed light on their evolutionary relationships
2
Q
What are phylogenetic trees?
A
They are one way to accomplish systematics. It is a hypothesis about the evolutionary history of related species.
3
Q
What are cladistics?
A
Cladistics is the analysis of clades
4
Q
What are clades?
A
Clades are a group that consists of an ancestral species and all its descendants - a distinct branch in the tree of life.
5
Q
What is a speciation event?
A
The splitting of two distinct species
6
Q
What is the relatedness of species?
A
We can determine how closely related two species are by finding their most common ancestor
