A little more on reading and building phylogenies
Tree thinking quizzes (select 'download supplement')
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Welcome to Applied Evolution
Welcome to the blog for Applied Evolution at UH, fall 2008. I will use this site to post course information, announcements, lecture notes, etc. Please check this site often. If you have questions or comments, please reply to the relevant post.
Readings
Course information
Slides
- Intro to course
- Evolution and Medicine
- HIV.1
- HIV.2
- Infectious Disease
- Antibiotic resistance
- Evolution of Virulence
- Non-infectious disease
- Lactose intolerance
- Forensics: Rape and Murder
- Forensics: Pathogen spread
- Domestication: Artificial Selection
- Domestication: Unintended Effects
- GMOs in food production
- Directed Evolution
- Eugenics: Evolutionary mis-applications
- Conservation: Understanding Biodiversity
- Conservation: Identifying strategies
- Bioprospecting
- Conservation Forensics
- Evolution of Cancer
- Contagious Cancer
Posts
2 comments:
I understand how to construct a tree, but I do not understand how we know if the tree we construct is wrong, like the example in the "icp" website. How do we know when the tree is wrong by looking at the numbers in the table?
Great question. The answer is that you don't know, and you have no way on knowing, unless you watched the evolution occur (as with experimental evolution or computer simulation) or you made the tree up (as in the icp website example). The point is that sometimes some methods of phylogeny reconstruction don't give you the right tree. That's why researchers often use several different methods to build a phylogeny, and are continuously working to find methods that give the "wrong" tree less often.
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