From Natural Systems to Genomic Trees: What Evolutionary Trees Really Tell Us
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16 May, 2:30 pm, Laboratory Hall
To understand the present, we must reconstruct the past. Just as political history explains modern borders and alliances, evolutionary history explains why organisms have the forms they do and why they live where they do. Systematics may sometimes appear old-fashioned, yet every biologist ultimately works with particular organisms, and any knowledge about structure, function, or ecology only becomes predictive when placed within an evolutionary framework. Long before Darwin, biologists spoke of “natural systems”. Today, phylogenetic systematics provides the explicit and testable methodology to approach that goal.
One of the great strengths of modern evolutionary (phylogenetic) set of methods is transparency. Phylogenetic hypotheses are built from defined data and explicit analytical methods. They may be right or wrong, but they are testable. Debate therefore concerns evidence, not authority. At the same time, evolutionary trees are among the most frequently misunderstood scientific diagrams. Together with Dr. Fedor Konstantinov from the National Natural History Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences explore why trees do not depict progress, “higher” and “lower” organisms, or “main” and “side” branches. One cannot judge relatedness by reading across the tips or by counting similarities. Only the branching pattern matters. Frogs are not “closer to fish than to humans.” Crocodiles are more closely related to birds than to lizards. Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees. Trees describe shared ancestry, not living ancestor–descendant chains.
The logic of inference is similar whether we analyze morphology or DNA: we seek homologous characters and distinguish them from convergence. Molecular data, however, have transformed the scale of analysis. Even a single gene may provide hundreds of characters; genomic approaches provide many thousands. This abundance of discrete, comparable characters has stimulated the development of increasingly powerful statistical methods and has turned phylogenetics into one of the most dynamic fields in evolutionary biology.
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Description
Fedor Konstantinov is a world-class expert in systematics and phylogenetics of insects with the focus on true bugs (Hemiptera). He has described many species new to science, and revised many taxa of the true bug family Miridae. In addition to taxonomy, he summed and analyzed data on the distribution and host plants of each revised group. He reconstructed in detail the phylogeny of both the entire big subfamily Bryocorinae and its individual groups, several clades of the subfamily Phylinae and the planthopper family Issidae. F.V. Konstantinov’s research is characterized by an integrated approach combining detailed morphological analysis, the use of molecular data and cybertaxonomic methods. His experience in thorough molecular and morphological investigations of insect systematics is extremely important for the successful implementation of his scientific and educational projects. Additionally, he has more than 20 years of experience in the curation of natural history collections in the leading European and American museums, and he is experienced in university-based teaching and mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students.
Image credit: Khan Academy
