Get Phylogenetic essential facts below. View Videos or join the Phylogenetic discussion. Add Phylogenetic to your PopFlock.com topic list for future reference or share this resource on social media.
Phylogenetic
Study of evolutionary relationships between organisms
In biology, phylogenetics[1][2] (Greek, - phylé, phylon = tribe, clan, race + - genetikós = origin, source, birth)[3] is a part of systematics that addresses the inference of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups of organisms (e.g. species, or more inclusive taxa). These relationships are hypothesized by phylogenetic inference methods that evaluate observed heritable traits, such as DNA sequences or morphology, often under a specified model of evolution of these traits. The result of such an analysis is a phylogeny (also known as a phylogenetic tree)--a diagrammatic hypothesis of relationships that reflects the evolutionary history of a group of organisms.[4] The tips of a phylogenetic tree can be living taxa or fossils, and represent the 'end', or the present, in an evolutionary lineage. A phylogenetic diagram can be rooted or unrooted. A rooted tree diagram indicates the hypothetical common ancestor, or ancestral lineage, of the tree. An unrooted tree diagram (a network) makes no assumption about the ancestral line, and does not show the origin or "root" of the taxa in question or the direction of inferred evolutionary transformations.[5] In addition to their proper use for inferring phylogenetic patterns among taxa, phylogenetic analyses are often employed to represent relationships among gene copies or individual organisms. Such uses have become central to understanding biodiversity, evolution, ecology, and genomes.
Taxonomy is the identification, naming and classification of organisms. Classifications are now usually based on phylogenetic data, and many systematists contend that only monophyletic taxa should be recognized as named groups. The degree to which classification depends on inferred evolutionary history differs depending on the school of taxonomy: phenetics ignores phylogenetic speculation altogether, trying to represent the similarity between organisms instead; cladistics (phylogenetic systematics) tries to reflect phylogeny in its classifications by only recognizing groups based on shared, derived characters (synapomorphies); evolutionary taxonomy tries to take into account both the branching pattern and "degree of difference" to find a compromise between them.
Phenetics, popular in the mid-20th century but now largely obsolete, used distance matrix-based methods to construct trees based on overall similarity in morphology or similar observable traits (i.e. in the phenotype or the overall similarity of DNA, not the DNA sequence), which was often assumed to approximate phylogenetic relationships.
Prior to 1950, phylogenetic inferences were generally presented as narrative scenarios. Such methods are often ambiguous and lack explicit criteria for evaluating alternative hypotheses.[6][7][8]
History
The term "phylogeny" derives from the German Phylogenie, introduced by Haeckel in 1866,[9] and the Darwinian approach to classification became known as the "phyletic" approach.[10]
Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation theory
During the late 19th century, Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation theory, or "biogenetic fundamental law", was widely accepted. It was often expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", i.e. the development of a single organism during its lifetime, from germ to adult, successively mirrors the adult stages of successive ancestors of the species to which it belongs. But this theory has long been rejected.[11][12] Instead, ontogeny evolves - the phylogenetic history of a species cannot be read directly from its ontogeny, as Haeckel thought would be possible, but characters from ontogeny can be (and have been) used as data for phylogenetic analyses; the more closely related two species are, the more apomorphies their embryos share.
Timeline of key points
Branching tree diagram from Heinrich Georg Bronn's work (1858)
Phylogenetic tree suggested by Haeckel (1866)
14th century, lex parsimoniae (parsimony principle), William of Ockam, English philosopher, theologian, and Franciscan friar, but the idea actually goes back to Aristotle, precursor concept
1763, Bayesian probability, Rev. Thomas Bayes,[13] precursor concept
18th century, Pierre Simon (Marquis de Laplace), perhaps first to use ML (maximum likelihood), precursor concept
1809, evolutionary theory, Philosophie Zoologique,Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, precursor concept, foreshadowed in the 17th century and 18th century by Voltaire, Descartes, and Leibniz, with Leibniz even proposing evolutionary changes to account for observed gaps suggesting that many species had become extinct, others transformed, and different species that share common traits may have at one time been a single race,[14] also foreshadowed by some early Greek philosophers such as Anaximander in the 6th century BC and the atomists of the 5th century BC, who proposed rudimentary theories of evolution[15]
1837, Darwin's notebooks show an evolutionary tree[16]
1843, distinction between homology and analogy (the latter now referred to as homoplasy), Richard Owen, precursor concept
1858, Paleontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn (1800-1862) published a hypothetical tree to illustrating the paleontological "arrival" of new, similar species following the extinction of an older species. Bronn did not propose a mechanism responsible for such phenomena, precursor concept.[17]
1858, elaboration of evolutionary theory, Darwin and Wallace,[18] also in Origin of Species by Darwin the following year, precursor concept
1866, Ernst Haeckel, first publishes his phylogeny-based evolutionary tree, precursor concept
1893, Dollo's Law of Character State Irreversibility,[19] precursor concept
1912, ML recommended, analyzed, and popularized by Ronald Fisher, precursor concept
1921, Tillyard uses term "phylogenetic" and distinguishes between archaic and specialized characters in his classification system[20]
1963, first attempt to use ML (maximum likelihood) for phylogenetics, Edwards and Cavalli-Sforza[25]
1965
Camin-Sokal parsimony, first parsimony (optimization) criterion and first computer program/algorithm for cladistic analysis both by Camin and Sokal[26]
character compatibility method, also called clique analysis, introduced independently by Camin and Sokal (loc. cit.) and E. O. Wilson[27]
NNI (nearest neighbour interchange), first branch-swapping search strategy, developed independently by Robinson[35] and Moore et al.
ME (minimum evolution), Kidd and Sgaramella-Zonta[36] (it is unclear if this is the pairwise distance method or related to ML as Edwards and Cavalli-Sforza call ML "minimum evolution")
1996, first working methods for BI (Bayesian Inference)independently developed by Li,[61] Mau,[62] and Rannala and Yang[63] and all using MCMC (Markov chain-Monte Carlo)
1998, TNT (Tree Analysis Using New Technology), Goloboff, Farris, and Nixon
2004,2005, symmilarity metric (using an approximation to Kolmogorov complexity) or NCD (normalized compression distance), Li et al.,[65] Cilibrasi and Vitanyi.[66]
^Richard C. Brusca & Gary J. Brusca (2003). Invertebrates (2nd ed.). Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates. ISBN978-0-87893-097-5.
^Bock, W. J. (2004). Explanations in systematics. Pp. 49-56. In Williams, D. M. and Forey, P. L. (eds) Milestones in Systematics. London: Systematics Association Special Volume Series 67. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida.
^Auyang, Sunny Y. (1998). Narratives and Theories in Natural History. In: Foundations of complex-system theories: in economics, evolutionary biology, and statistical physics. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press.[page needed]
^Blechschmidt, Erich (1977) The Beginnings of Human Life. Springer-Verlag Inc., p. 32: "The so-called basic law of biogenetics is wrong. No buts or ifs can mitigate this fact. It is not even a tiny bit correct or correct in a different form, making it valid in a certain percentage. It is totally wrong."
^Ehrlich, Paul; Richard Holm; Dennis Parnell (1963) The Process of Evolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 66: "Its shortcomings have been almost universally pointed out by modern authors, but the idea still has a prominent place in biological mythology. The resemblance of early vertebrate embryos is readily explained without resort to mysterious forces compelling each individual to reclimb its phylogenetic tree."
^Dollo, Louis. 1893. Les lois de l'évolution. Bull. Soc. Belge Géol. Paléont. Hydrol. 7: 164-66.
^Tillyard, R. J (2012). "A New Classification of the Order Perlaria". The Canadian Entomologist. 53 (2): 35-43. doi:10.4039/Ent5335-2.
^Hennig, Willi (1950). Grundzüge einer Theorie der Phylogenetischen Systematik [Basic features of a theory of phylogenetic systematics] (in German). Berlin: Deutscher Zentralverlag. OCLC12126814.[page needed]
^Wagner, Warren Herbert (1952). "The fern genus Diellia: structure, affinities, and taxonomy". University of California Publications in Botany. 26 (1-6): 1-212. OCLC4228844.
^Cain, A. J; Harrison, G. A (2009). "Phyletic Weighting". Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. 135 (1): 1-31. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7998.1960.tb05828.x.
^Wilson, Edward O (1965). "A Consistency Test for Phylogenies Based on Contemporaneous Species". Systematic Zoology. 14 (3): 214-20. doi:10.2307/2411550. JSTOR2411550.
^Hennig. W. (1966). Phylogenetic systematics. Illinois University Press, Urbana.[page needed]
^Farris, James S (1969). "A Successive Approximations Approach to Character Weighting". Systematic Zoology. 18 (4): 374-85. doi:10.2307/2412182. JSTOR2412182.
^ abKluge, A. G; Farris, J. S (1969). "Quantitative Phyletics and the Evolution of Anurans". Systematic Biology. 18 (1): 1-32. doi:10.1093/sysbio/18.1.1.
^Quesne, Walter J. Le (1969). "A Method of Selection of Characters in Numerical Taxonomy". Systematic Zoology. 18 (2): 201-205. doi:10.2307/2412604. JSTOR2412604.
^Farris, J. S (1970). "Methods for Computing Wagner Trees". Systematic Biology. 19: 83-92. doi:10.1093/sysbio/19.1.83.
^Neyman, J. (1971). Molecular studies: A source of novel statistical problems. In: Gupta S. S., Yackel J. (eds), Statistical Decision Theory and Related Topics, pp. 1-27. Academic Press, New York.
^Fitch, W. M (1971). "Toward Defining the Course of Evolution: Minimum Change for a Specific Tree Topology". Systematic Biology. 20 (4): 406-16. doi:10.1093/sysbio/20.4.406. JSTOR2412116.
^Robinson, D.F (1971). "Comparison of labeled trees with valency three". Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B. 11 (2): 105-19. doi:10.1016/0095-8956(71)90020-7.
^Adams, E. N (1972). "Consensus Techniques and the Comparison of Taxonomic Trees". Systematic Biology. 21 (4): 390-397. doi:10.1093/sysbio/21.4.390.
^Farris, James S (1976). "Phylogenetic Classification of Fossils with Recent Species". Systematic Zoology. 25 (3): 271-282. doi:10.2307/2412495. JSTOR2412495.
^Farris, J. S (1977). "Phylogenetic Analysis Under Dollo's Law". Systematic Biology. 26: 77-88. doi:10.1093/sysbio/26.1.77.
^Nelson, G (1979). "Cladistic Analysis and Synthesis: Principles and Definitions, with a Historical Note on Adanson's Familles Des Plantes (1763-1764)". Systematic Biology. 28: 1-21. doi:10.1093/sysbio/28.1.1.
^Efron B. (1979). Bootstrap methods: another look at the jackknife. Ann. Stat. 7: 1-26.
^Margush, T; McMorris, F (1981). "Consensus-trees". Bulletin of Mathematical Biology. 43 (2): 239. doi:10.1016/S0092-8240(81)90019-7.
^Sokal, Robert R; Rohlf, F. James (1981). "Taxonomic Congruence in the Leptopodomorpha Re-Examined". Systematic Zoology. 30 (3): 309. doi:10.2307/2413252. JSTOR2413252.
^Archie, James W (1989). "Homoplasy Excess Ratios: New Indices for Measuring Levels of Homoplasy in Phylogenetic Systematics and a Critique of the Consistency Index". Systematic Zoology. 38 (3): 253-269. doi:10.2307/2992286. JSTOR2992286.
^D. L. Swofford and G. J. Olsen. 1990. Phylogeny reconstruction. In D. M. Hillis and G. Moritz (eds.), Molecular Systematics, pages 411-501. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Mass.
^Wilkinson, M (1994). "Common Cladistic Information and its Consensus Representation: Reduced Adams and Reduced Cladistic Consensus Trees and Profiles". Systematic Biology. 43 (3): 343-368. doi:10.1093/sysbio/43.3.343.
^Wilkinson, Mark (1995). "More on Reduced Consensus Methods". Systematic Biology. 44 (3): 435-439. doi:10.2307/2413604. JSTOR2413604.
Baum, David A.; Smith, Stacey D. (2013). Tree Thinking: an introduction to phylogenetic biology. Greenwood Village, CO: Roberts and Company. ISBN978-1-936221-16-5. OCLC767565978.