Phylogenetics

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PHYLOGENY
Ascii phylogeny tree | Common ancestor | Evolutionary systematics | Evolutionary tree | Mikko's Phylogeny Archive | Most Recent Common Ancestor | PhyloCode | Phylogeography | Phylogenetic tree | Phylogenetics | Recapitulation theory | Supertree | Tree diagram | Tree of Life | Tree of Life Web Project


In biology, phylogenetics Greek: phylon = tribe, race and genetikos = relative to birth, from genesis = birth) is the study of evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms (e.g., species, populations). Also known as phylogenetic systematics, phylogenetics treats a species as a group of lineage-connected individuals over time. Phylogenetics can be defined as systematics, with the organizing principle being evolution. Phylogenetic taxonomy, which is an offshoot of, but not a logical consequence of, phylogenetic systematics, constitutes a means of classifying groups of organisms according to degree of evolutionary relatedness.

The most commonly used methods to infer phylogenies include parsimony, maximum likelihood, and MCMC-based Bayesian inference. Distance-based methods construct trees based on overall similarity which is often assumed to approximate phylogenetic relationships. All methods depend upon an implicit or explicit mathematical model describing the evolution of characters observed in the species included, and are usually used for molecular phylogeny where the characters are aligned nucleotide or amino acid sequences.

PHYLOGENETICS
Cladistics | Gene transfer | Molecular phylogeny | Phylogenetic taxonomy | Phylogenetic tree | Taxon sampling



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This page incorporates material from Wikipedia which is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Wikipedia url for material on this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics
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