Introduction to Evolutionary Biology and Systematics

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and definitions from the lecture notes on evolution, systematics, and cladograms.

Evolutionary processes

Biological changes that typically occur over longer-term timescales.

Ecological processes

Biological events and interactions happening right now over generational timescales.

Regulatory elements

Parts of the genome that determine whether a stretch of DNA is activated or not.

Equisetum

Horsetail, a bamboo-like plant found in wet areas that is part of a lineage appearing virtually unchanged from its ancestral state.

Contingency

The concept that evolutionary outcomes happen uniquely due to the local environment, making future states harder to predict.

Systematics

The reconstruction and study of evolutionary relationships.

Phylogeny

An evolutionary tree that represents a hypothesis about patterns of relationship among species.

Hypothesis

An idea about how evolutionary patterns might have arisen that is below a established thesis and not taken as absolute truth.

Clade

A group consisting of an ancestor and all of its descendants.

Monophyletic group

A taxon or group made up of an ancestor and all of its descendants, synonymous with a clade.

Cladogram

A diagram that shows evolutionary relatedness but does not contain information about evolutionary distance between groups.

Node

A branch point on a phylogeny representing an ancestral population that gave rise to multiple daughter groups.

Degree of relatedness

A measure determined by how recently two groups share a common ancestor.