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Chapter 14 Section 2. How Biologists Classify Organisms. Grade 10 Biology Spring 2011. What is a Species?. Biological species: a group of natural populations that are interbreeding or that could interbreed, and that are reproductively isolated from other such groups. What is a Species?.
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Chapter 14 Section 2 How Biologists Classify Organisms Grade 10 Biology Spring 2011
What is a Species? • Biological species: a group of natural populations that are interbreeding or that could interbreed, and that are reproductively isolated from other such groups
What is a Species? • Hybrids: sometimes individuals of different species interbreed and produce offspring • Species are closely related when they can interbreed and produce fertile hybrids
Evaluating the Biological Species Concept • Works well for most members of kingdom Animalia • Some species are able to form fertile offspring with closely related species • Fails to describe species that reproduce asexually • Biologist recognize species by studying an organism’s features
Evolutionary History • Classification based on similarities should reflect an organism’s phylogeny • Its evolutionary history • This can be misleading, not all characters are inherited from a common ancestor • Wings of bird vs. wings of insect
Evolutionary History • Convergent evolution: similarities evolve in organisms not closely related to one another, often because the organisms live in similar habitats • Analogous structures: similarities that arise through convergent evolution
Evolutionary History • Divergent evolution: similarities evolve in organisms not closely related to one another
Cladistics • Cladistics: method of analysis that reconstructs phylogenies by inferring relationships based on shared characters • Can be used to hypothesize the sequence in which different groups of organisms evolved
Cladistics • Ancestral character: with respect to two different groups, a character is defined as an ancestral character if it evolved in a common ancestor of both groups • Ex. Birds and mammals, backbone is an ancestral character
Cladistics • Derived character: evolved in an ancestor of one group but not of the other • Ex. Feathers evolved in an ancestor of birds that was not also ancestral to mammals
Cladistics • Cladogram: branching diagram, shows the evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms
Evolutionary Systematics • Evolutionary systematics: taxonomists give varying degrees of importance to characters and thus produce a subjective analysis of evolutionary relationships • Phylogenetic tree: branching diagram based on evolutionary systematics