Phylogenies and the History of Life

Recall cards on phylogeny and the history of life: organizing life on Earth (phylogeny and phylogenetic trees, taxonomy and systematics, the Linnaean hierarchy, the three domains, binomial nomenclature, and the parts of a tree, including rooted and unrooted trees, nodes, basal and sister taxa, polytomies, and what branch length does and does not mean); determining evolutionary relationships (homologous versus analogous structures and homoplasies, molecular systematics, cladistics and clades, shared ancestral versus shared derived characters, and maximum parsimony); and perspectives on the phylogenetic tree (horizontal gene transfer and its mechanisms, gene transfer agents, HGT in prokaryotes and eukaryotes, and alternative models of early evolution, including the web-of-life, ring-of-life, endosymbiont, and genome-fusion models).

Source: OpenStax Biology 2e (2018), Chapter 20, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.