Topic 4 Flashcards
What is Systematics?
- the theory and practice of classifying organisms based on evolutionary history (phylogeny)
- systematics attempt to construct evolutionary informative classifications.
What is a phylogeny ?
- depicted as a phylogenetic tree
- evolutionary history of a species, or group of related species.
What do phylogenetic trees show?
- show hypotheses for the evolutionary decent of different organisms, or genes from common ancestors.
Phylogenies are inferred from…
- Morphological data - the size, shape, and presence of different anatomical features.
- Molecular data - molecular systematics uses DNA, RNA, and protein structures to infer phylogenies.
A phylogenetic tree is…
a hypotheses about evolutionary relationships among a set of organisms called taxa.
- each branch point (node) represents the divergence of two species (speciation).
- each node represents the last common ancestor.
What is sister taxa?
Two descendants that split from the same node.
What does it mean when a phylogenetic tree is rooted?
One branch that corresponds to the common ancestor of all taxa on the tree.
What is polytomy?
a branch in a phylogenetic tree from which more than two groups emerge.
- typically represent unresolved patterns of divergence.
What is a basal taxon?
diverges early in a phylogenetic tree, and in the history of the group. Originates near the common ancestor.
What is a clade?
A piece of a phylogeny that includes an ancestor and all descendants (living and extinct) of that ancestor.
- a piece of a larger tree that can be cut away from the root with a single cut.
- clades form a nested hierarchy.
Can a single external branch be a clade?
Yes.
Because tips of external branches (descendent taxa) may represent a group group of taxa.
- it includes all descendants of a single ancestor.
What is a cladogram?
- 1 of 2 types of phylogenetic trees
- depict evolutionary relationships where only the pattern of branching (the topology) is important.
- branch length and the position of the descendant taxa convey no information.
- does not convey the passage of time.
What are phylograms?
- 1 of 2 types of phylogenetic trees
- also depict evolutionary patterns, but branch lengths are proportional to evolutionary change.
- phylogram branch length can represent chronological time, and may also reflect the number of character changes that took place between taxa in that lineage.
What do phylograms show?
- evolutionary relationships, not evolutionary progress.
- taxa that share a more recent common ancestor are more closely related.
- the number of nodes between a taxa does not indicate the relatedness of the taxa.
What do phylogenetic polytomies indicate?
- Lack of knowledge - polytomy indicates there is insufficient data to resolve patterns of divergence (do not make conclusions about lineages)
- Rapid speciation - multiple speciation events possibly happened at the same time. (ex: when a species rapidly expands its geographic range).