Phylogenesis (from Greek φῦλονphylon "tribe" + γένεσιςgenesis "origin") is thebiological process by which ataxon (of anyrank) appears. The science that studies these processes is calledphylogenetics.[1][2][3][4][5]
These terms may be confused with the termphylogenetics, the application ofmolecular -analytical methods (i.e.molecular biology andgenomics), in the explanation ofphylogeny and its research.
Phylogenetic relationships are discovered throughphylogenetic inference methods that evaluate observedheritable traits, such asDNA sequences or overallmorpho-anatomical,ethological, and other characteristics.
The result of these analyses is aphylogeny (also known as aphylogenetic tree) – a diagrammatic hypothesis about the history of the evolutionary relationships of a group of organisms.[6] Phylogenetic analyses have become central to understanding biodiversity, evolution,ecological genetics andgenomes.
Cladistics (Greekκλάδος,klados, i.e. "branch")[7] is an approach tobiological classification in whichorganisms are categorized based on shared, derived characteristics that can be traced to a group'smost recent common ancestor and are not present in more distant ancestors. Therefore, members of a group are assumed to share a common history and are considered to be closely related.[8][9][10][11]
The cladistic method interprets each character state transformation implied by the distribution of shared character states among taxa (or other terminals) as a potential piece of evidence for grouping. The outcome of a cladistic analysis is acladogram – atree-shaped diagram (dendrogram)[12] that is interpreted to represent the best hypothesis of phylogenetic relationships.
Although traditionally such cladograms were generated largely on the basis of morphological characteristics calculated by hand,genetic sequencing data andcomputational phylogenetics are now commonly used and theparsimony criterion has been abandoned by many phylogeneticists in favor of more "sophisticated" (but less parsimonious) evolutionary models of character state transformation.
Taxonomy (Greek languageτάξις,taxis = 'order', 'arrangement' +νόμος,nomos = 'law' or 'science') is the classification, identification and naming of organisms. It is usually richly informed by phylogenetics, but remains a methodologically and logically distinct discipline.[13] The degree to which taxonomies depend on phylogenies (or classification depends on evolutionary development) differs depending on the school of taxonomy:phenetics ignores phylogeny altogether, trying to represent the similarity between organisms instead;cladistics (phylogenetic systematics) tries to reproduce phylogeny in its classification.
An extension of phylogenesis to the cellular level byJean-Jacques Kupiec[14][15] is known asOntophylogenesis
Phylogenetics is the branch of life science concerned with the analysis of molecular sequencing data to study evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms.
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