Tree thinking : an introduction to phylogenetic biology
"Baum and Smith, both professors evolutionary biology and researchers in the field of systematics, present this highly accessible introduction to phylogenetics and its importance in modern biology. Ever since Darwin, the evolutionary histories of organisms have been portrayed in the form of branching trees or “phylogenies.” However, the broad significance of the phylogenetic trees has come to be appreciated only quite recently. Phylogenetics has myriad applications in biology, from discovering the features present in ancestral organisms, to finding the sources of invasive species and infectious diseases, to identifying our closest living (and extinct) hominid relatives
xx, 476 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9781936221165, 1936221160
767565978
Introduction. Phylogenetic trees and their importance in modern biology
Interpreting trees. Tree thinking and its importance in the development of evolutionary thought ; What a phylogenetic tree represents ; Trait evolution ; Relatedness and taxonomy ; Gene trees and species trees
Inferring trees. Phylogenetic inference with parsimony ; Phylogenetic inference with distance, maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods ; Statistical tests of phylogenetic hypotheses ; Using trees to study character evolution ; Using trees to study space, time, and evolutionary diversification