Topic 3 - Phylogeny and Classification Flashcards
What can be arranged into a tree of life?
Individual groups of organisms via extrapolations can be arranged into one.
What do closely adjacent branches indicate?
- that they were more recently derived from a common ancestor
What do more distant branches indicate?
- species derived from more ancient common ancestors
What 5 points can Phylogenentic Trees tell us?
- how organisms are related
- the inferred ages of organisms (and their lineages)
- how traits evolved and their order
- how species coevolved
- evolutionary history of specific genes
What does phylogeny mean?
- genealogical relationship of organisms which species share between a recent common ancestor
Give a specific example of what Phylogenetic Trees can tell us.
- the relationship between photosynthesis ability versus cellular respiration
What was Darwins basis for evolutionary classification?
- resemblance implying relationship (descent)
- he used quantifiable information to expand his classification (an axis)
- at the end of branches he implied a single ancestor may radiate multiple daughter species
What does Anagenesis refer to?
- change within a single lineage
- the change occurring within a species before it splits to form most recent common ancestor into two new species
What does Cladogenesis refer to?
- branching of a lineage into two or more descendant lineages
- the change that occurred when an ancestor split into two different distinguishable species
What are examples of continuous line of descent (Ana or Clado?)
- if there is a continuous line of descent from one ancestor it is still known as the same species (even if there is slight differences between ancestor and daughter species)
What do similarities among organisms indicate?
- it would indicate their descent from a common ancestor
- ex. primates
What does Homology refer to?
- it refers to similarity that is the result of common ancestry
- ex. equivalent structures via skeletal elements
What does homologous from common descent mean?
- similarities from the same structure being inherited down DIFFERENT LINEAGES
What shape does scientific classification occur in?
- living organisms are classified in a hierarchy corresponding to divergences of lineages
What does a taxon refer to?
- a group at any of these levels (species, family, order, class)
Define Synapomorphies
a shared derived character
- basis of phylogenetic trees
Define Apomorphies
a derived trait
How do we know what character state came first? Character Polarity.
- we do not know what character state is ANCESTRAL or DERIVED
- to perform phylogenetic analyses, it would require that we infer for all characters the direction of evolutionary change (polarity)
What is one way of inferring character polarity?
- For any Characters
- Out group analysis: character states in the out group taxa are taken as the starting point - by comparing taxa of interest with related taxa outside the group being studied
What is the other way of inferring polarity?
- for morphological characters
- evidence of a fossil record or developmental studies
- character states occurring earlier in time or development are more likely to be ancestral