PCB 4674C Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Biomedicine, Heredity
Document Summary
Evolutionary trees are diagrams that are hypotheses about the relationships of individuals, populations, or species. It is difficult to pick up a biological journal or magazine of any type these days without finding a few images of evolutionary trees. The have become so common because they are quite useful, in fact indispensable, in biological questions ranging from ecology to evolutionary biology, systematics, and biomedicine and everything in between. We have made incredible progress in deciphering the tree of life: despite this, interpreting evolutionary trees can be tricky at first, and if fact many professional biologists routinely misinterpret evolutionary trees. Builds up the concept of an evolutionary tree from its most basic level. We start with 4 butterflies from a population: (a). Then we connect each of them with their parents: (b). Finally, these populations make up an interbreeding group isolated from other such interbreeding groups, that is, a species: (e).
