Middle Tennessee State University - BIOLOGY 1020Biology 1020 - Lab 1 - Cassandra Titus

Document Content and Description Below

TAXONOMY, PHYLOGENIES, AND CLADOGRAMS OBJECTIVES  Identify the taxonomic categories  Explain the relationship between evolution and phylogeny  Use cladograms to evaluate the relationships... between organisms INTRODUCTION Humans have an insatiable need to categorize objects, whether they are living or otherwise. Taxonomy is the branch of biology that is concerned with identifying, naming, and classifying living organisms. A phylogeny represents the hypothesized evolutionary relationships of a group of organisms. Phylogenetics attempts to create meaningful groupings of related organisms. Cladograms are one type of phylogenetic tree that use shared derived characters to illustrate plausible evolutionary pathways. Shared derived characters are evolutionarily novel traits used to group together organisms that have that character in common. These characters are considered derived because the trait is more recently evolved and doesn’t trace back to earlier ancestors. LABORATORY ACTIVITIES EXERCISE 1: UNDERSTANDING TAXONOMY All living organisms can be placed into three broad categories or domains. They are the Domain Bacteria, Domain Archaea, and Domain Eukarya. Bacteria and Archaea are examples of prokaryotes and have a unique cell structure compared to other living organisms. All living organisms in Domain Eukarya are eukaryotes. Eukaryotes include protists, fungi, plants, and animals. The difference between prokaryotes and eukaryotes centers on the fact that prokaryotes do not have a nucleus (or other membrane-bound organelles) but eukaryotes do. Below is an example of the categories used in the standard taxonomic system. Domain, which is an all inclusive category Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species, which is the most exclusive category [Show More]

Last updated: 1 year ago

Preview 1 out of 7 pages