Understanding Evolution

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Understanding Evolution

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Understanding evolutionary trees

Grade Level(s):

  • 13-16
  • Advanced
  • General

Source:

  • Evolution: Education and Outreach

Resource type:

  • Article

Time: 30 minutes

Overview

Many disciplines within biology (and many basic biology texts) have come to depend on evolutionary trees. Get the basics you need to understand and interpret these key diagrams.
This article appears at SpringerLink.

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simple evolutionary tree
  • [History of life: Grades 13-16] Present-day species evolved from earlier species; the relatedness of organisms is the result of common ancestry.
  • [Mechanisms of evolution: Grades 13-16] Evolution does not consist of progress in any particular direction.
  • [Studying evolution: Grades 13-16] Evolutionary trees (i.e., phylogenies or cladograms) portray hypotheses about evolutionary relationships.

There are no NGSS/DCI concepts currently linked to this resource.

This article is written for teachers and is fairly long, but it can easily be understood by undergraduates. It explicitly corrects common misconceptions about phylogenies.