Phylogeny: Where Does It Go?
Conserved Core Process
All life has shared many features that stayed the same during the course of evolution. Theses conserved traits are what keeps our relation between everything
living. For example your house is a different color and stay than your friends
and neighbors houses, however they still all have the same things in them such
as bathrooms, bedrooms and kitchens.
All domains Eukaryotes, Achaea and Bacteria
have DNA ( gene sequence). Every organism that we have found to date has
its own DNA and this provides biological evidence. The great thing about DNA is that is universal
and can be changed and manipulated. See
what makes “you” at the end of the day is the process of the Central Dogma. This process involves
how DNA process RNA into proteins.
Another attribute that all life has is metabolism. Metabolism is the process
of how energy is cycled through a organism. Just like eating a pizza, your body
is processing usable energy for your body to use and then process it out for a
cycle of energy. Though organism process energy through anaerobic or aerobic
respiration, they all share the characteristic for metabolism.
The final attribute that life
shares are the evolution of eukaryotes supports the relatedness through structural evidence. All eukaryotes
have a cytoskeleton that helps the cells to move, morphological integrity and
organelle transport. Another example of eukaryote structural evidence is
membrane bound organelles, such as the mitochondria and chloroplast. Scientist
theorized that at first these membrane bound organelles were bacteria that
lived in the cell and evolved to become part of the cell.
All of these characteristics are conserved
all across the tree of life. From eukaryotes to bacteria they all have the same
attributes that are followed through life.
Phylogenetic Tree
When you look back at your family tree you
look back at all of your relatives and see the history of everyone. Phylogeny is the evolutionary history
of a species or group of species. Scientists use systematics to understand the diversity and relationships of
organisms. Fossils, morphological and
molecular evidence, support this process. By using this process scientist can then order them into categories.
Taxonomy is the ordered division of
organism into categories. The biological
name of a species is two parts. The first one is the genus and the second part is the specific epithet. The specific epithet is specific only to that
species. Our biological name is homo sapiens which means wise man. Once you
piece all of these bits together you have created a classification system.
Below is the Hierarchical
classification of life
Phylogenetic trees are branching
diagrams that depict hypotheses about evolutionary relationships of all life. A
cladogram is a diagram that shows
patterns of shared characteristics. Both
of these diagrams show traits that have been lost or have been gained from
evolution. A clade is a group of
species that includes an ancestral species and all of its descendants.
Here are some examples of
Phylogenetic trees and cladograms:
References:
