BI111 Chapter Notes - Chapter 19: Prokaryote, Archosauromorpha, Molecular Clock
Document Summary
The first is to reconstruct the phylogeny or evolutionary history of a group of organisms. Phylogenies are presented as phylogenetic trees, which are formal hypotheses identifying likely relationships among species. These are essential to the comparative method that is used to analyze evolutionary processes. The second goal is taxonomy, the identification and naming of species and their placement in classification. A classification is an arrangement of organisms into hierarchical groups that reflect their relatedness. 19. 3 a family is a group of genera that closely resemble one another. Similar families are grouped into orders, similar orders into classes, similar classes into phyla, similar phyla into kingdoms and lastly, all life on earth is classified into three domains. 19. 5 useful systematic characteristics must be genetically independent, reflecting different parts of organisms" genomes. Systematic analyses rely on the comparison of homologous characters as indicators of common ancestry and genetic relatedness. Analogous characters are homoplasious, phenotypic similarities that evolved independently in different lineages.
