What kind of trait is important to cladistics?

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Learning Outcomes

• Define and describe passive transport

How do scientists construct phylogenetic trees? After they sort the homologous and analogous traits, scientists often organize the homologous traits using cladistics. This system sorts organisms into clades: groups of organisms that descended from a single ancestor. For example, in Figure 1, all the organisms in the orange region evolved from a single ancestor that had amniotic eggs. Consequently, these organisms also have amniotic eggs and make a single clade, or a monophyletic group. Clades must include all descendants from a branch point.

Practice Question

Figure 1. Lizards, rabbits, and humans all descend from a common ancestor that had an amniotic egg. Thus, lizards, rabbits, and humans all belong to the clade Amniota. Vertebrata is a larger clade that also includes fish and lamprey.

Which animals in this figure belong to a clade that includes animals with hair? Which evolved first, hair or the amniotic egg?

Show Answer

Rabbits and humans belong in the clade that includes animals with hair. The amniotic egg evolved before hair because the Amniota clade is larger than the clade that encompasses animals with hair.

Clades can vary in size depending on which branch point one references. The important factor is that all organisms in the clade or monophyletic group stem from a single point on the tree. You can remember this because monophyletic breaks down into “mono,” meaning one, and “phyletic,” meaning evolutionary relationship. Figure 2 shows various clade examples. Notice how each clade comes from a single point; whereas, the non-clade groups show branches that do not share a single point.

Practice Question

Figure 2. All the organisms within a clade stem from a single point on the tree. A clade may contain multiple groups, as in the case of animals, fungi and plants, or a single group, as in the case of flagellates. Groups that diverge at a different branch point, or that do not include all groups in a single branch point, are not considered clades.

What is the largest clade in this diagram?

Show Answer

The largest clade encompasses the entire tree.

Shared Characteristics

Organisms evolve from common ancestors and then diversify. Scientists use the phrase “descent with modification” because even though related organisms have many of the same characteristics and genetic codes, changes occur. This pattern repeats over and over as one goes through the phylogenetic tree of life:

1. A change in the genetic makeup of an organism leads to a new trait which becomes prevalent in the group.
2. Many organisms descend from this point and have this trait.
3. New variations continue to arise: some are adaptive and persist, leading to new traits.
4. With new traits, a new branch point is determined (go back to step 1 and repeat).

If a characteristic is found in the ancestor of a group, it is considered a shared ancestral character because all of the organisms in the taxon or clade have that trait. The vertebral column in Figure 1 is a shared characteristic. Now consider the amniotic egg characteristic in the same figure. Only some of the organisms in Figure 1 have this trait, and to those that do, it is called a shared derived character because this trait derived at some point but does not include all of the ancestors in the tree.

The tricky aspect to shared ancestral and shared derived characters is the fact that these terms are relative. The same trait can be considered one or the other depending on the particular diagram being used. Returning to Figure 1, an amniotic egg is a shared derived trait for amniotes as a clade, because the immediate ancestor of amniotes, as well as other groups descended from the ancestor of amniotes, do not have it. However, it is a shared ancestral trait for any particular group of amniotes, such as the lizard, rabbit, or human (shown in Figure 1) because they all stem from an ancestor with that trait. These terms help scientists distinguish between clades in the building of phylogenetic trees.

Choosing the Right Relationships

Imagine being the person responsible for organizing all department store items properly—an overwhelming task. Organizing the evolutionary relationships of all life on Earth proves much more difficult: scientists must span enormous blocks of time and work with information from long-extinct organisms. Trying to decipher the proper connections, especially given the presence of homologies and analogies, makes the task of building an accurate tree of life extraordinarily difficult. Add to that advancing DNA technology, which now provides large quantities of genetic sequences for researchers to use and analzye. Taxonomy is a subjective discipline: many organisms have more than one connection to each other, so each taxonomist will decide the order of connections.

To aid in the tremendous task of describing phylogenies accurately, scientists often use the concept of maximum parsimony, which means that events occurred in the simplest, most obvious way. For example, if a group of people entered a forest preserve to hike, based on the principle of maximum parsimony, one could predict that most would hike on established trails rather than forge new ones.

For scientists deciphering evolutionary pathways, the same idea is used: the pathway of evolution probably includes the fewest major events that coincide with the evidence at hand. Starting with all of the homologous traits in a group of organisms, scientists look for the most obvious and simple order of evolutionary events that led to the occurrence of those traits.

Head to this website to learn how maximum parsimony is used to create phylogenetic trees.

These tools and concepts are only a few of the strategies scientists use to tackle the task of revealing the evolutionary history of life on Earth. Recently, newer technologies have uncovered surprising discoveries with unexpected relationships, such as the fact that people seem to be more closely related to fungi than fungi are to plants. Sound unbelievable? As the information about DNA sequences grows, scientists will become closer to mapping the evolutionary history of all life on Earth.

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