Lecture 15 - Phylogeny and Systematics |
The Tree of Life must be discovered through rigorous analysis. Genetic information is crucial because appearances can be deceiving, and species that look similar can prove to be genetically very dissimilar and not share recent common ancestors. Two criteria, used to determine what the "correct" Tree is, are simplicity and whether the tree maximizes the probability of observing what we actually see.
Stearns, Stephen C. and Rolf Hoekstra. Evolution: An Introduction, chapter 13
Yale University 2009. Some rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated on this page or on the Open Yale Courses website, all content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0)