Vocabulary
The discipline that groups organisms and determines their evolutionary relationships.
What is systematics?
A point where a lineage splits on a phylogenetic tree.
What is a node?
The highest taxonomic rank in the three-domain system.
What is domain?
Differences in DNA sequences are used to infer evolutionary distances.
What is molecular phylogenetics?
Similar features due to shared ancestry.
What is homology?
Standard two-part naming for species.
What is binomial nomenclature?
An evolutionary tree’s current species are all found at these.
What are the tips (terminal taxa)?
The domain that includes plants, animals, fungi, and protists.
What is Eukarya?
This hypothesis uses DNA change over time to estimate when species diverged.
What is the molecular clock?
A resemblance caused by adapting independently to similar environmental pressures.
What is convergent evolution?
Traits shared because of common ancestry.
What is homology?
This indicates shared ancestry in a branching diagram.
What is a common ancestor?
The system that groups organisms by evolutionary relationships rather than similarity alone.
What is phylogenetic classification?
Genes that evolve slowly are best for studying ancient divergences.
What are conserved genes (e.g., rRNA)?
Rapid diversification from a common ancestor into many forms.
What is adaptive radiation?
Traits that evolve independently in unrelated lineages.
What is analogy (homoplasy)?
Rotating branches around a node illustrates this principle.
What is that topology doesn’t change evolutionary relationships?
This scientist founded the modern system of naming species.
Who is Carolus Linnaeus?
When genes move between species without descent.
What is horizontal gene transfer?
The simplest explanation for evolutionary change on a tree, minimizing total character changes.
What is parsimony?
A group containing a common ancestor and all descendants.
What is a monophyletic group (clade)?
When two taxa share a more recent common ancestor with each other than with others.
What is close relatedness?
A group that includes an ancestor and some but not all descendants.
What is a paraphyletic group?
A statistical method that evaluates trees based on predefined mutation models.
What is maximum likelihood?
Using multiple genes to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree reduces error from this problem.
What is gene sampling bias?