phylogenetics

phylogenetics, in biology, the study of the ancestral relatedness of groups of organisms, whether alive or extinct.

History

Classification of the natural world into meaningful and useful categories has long been a basic human impulse and is systematically evident at least since time of ancient Greece. Dominant for close to 2,000 years in the West was the notion of a “Great Chain of Being,” or scala naturae, which emphasized a static notion of reality and depicted a hierarchy that started from matter and nature (such as rocks) and moved upward to humans, angels, and eventually and highest of all, God. Since Carolus Linnaeus, and especially since Charles Darwin, classificatory schemes have not only quickly put aside such notions as the scala naturae but also slowly moved away from postulating relationships between species based on either presumed essential traits or based on general physical similarity. The field of phylogenetics takes a functional and more scientific turn in its attempts to construct an objective depiction of evolutionary relationships between organisms based on genetic, molecular, archaeological, and historical studies and with the specific purpose of explaining, predicting, and testing similarities and differences between organisms.

The “tree of life”

Ancestral relationships among species are commonly represented as phylogenetic trees (also called cladograms or dendrograms). A cladogram is a physical diagrammatic representation of a hypothesis of inferred relationship between species. The evolutionary relatedness between species is reflected by branching pattern of the tree and the relative distance between species on the tree. Any two species will have a common ancestor at the point where their respective branches are traced back to intersect. The more recent a common ancestor to humans, the more closely related it is to humans. For example, the common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals would be traced back to approximately 500,000 years ago. Similarly, the common ancestor of humans/Neanderthals and chimpanzees existed approximately 6.5 million years ago. Thus, since humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor not shared by chimpanzees, we have reason to believe that humans are more closely related to Neanderthals than to chimpanzees. Similar retracing can be done farther and farther back on the branches of the tree of life to connect the common ancestry humans have with unicellular species some billions of years ago.

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Estimating relatedness

Cladograms can be constructed with the aid of technologies that estimate molecular divergences in key sequences of DNA or protein amino acids. Similar to the progress seen in estimating the age of organic substances with the use of radioactive decay technologies and carbon dating, the advent of molecular biological technologies in the later half of the 20th century have increasingly allowed scientists to more accurately estimate the degree of evolutionary relatedness at the genetic level. Taking two homologous DNA sequences in different species, one can estimate evolutionary distance by measuring the number of nucleotide substitutions that have occurred over time. Alternatively, using protein products of DNA expression, one can measure the number of amino acid substitutions that have occurred between homologous protein sequences.