BIO 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Carl Linnaeus, Mutation Rate
29 Jun 2016
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Document Summary
Used to identify hosts of major diseases (sars, mers) Used to make predictions about evolution (whales, hiv) Used to guide the conservation of endangered species. Used to understand how traits are assembled in a lineage over time. The number of hypotheses is equal to the number of taxa in the given data matrix. Characters and character states acquired from data are then analyzed to test which hypotheses is one of most parsimonious fit. Comparing treelengths (number of character state changes required for a hypothesis) of different phylogenies using parsimony. The one of best fit between matrix and hypothesis is the one with the fewest number of character state changes. Consistency index = minimum number of changes / actual number of changes (for all characters on a phylogeny) Consistency index is one measure of how good a hypothesis is. Using phylogenies allow for making predictions in lineages i. e. whales were once hypothesized to be closely related to hippos.
