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An evolutionary grade is a group of species united by morphological or physiological traits, that has given rise to another group that has major differences from the ancestral group's condition, and is thus not considered part of the ancestral group, while still having enough similarities that we can group them under the same clade.
Evolutionary taxonomy, evolutionary systematics or Darwinian classification is a branch of biological classification that seeks to classify organisms using a combination of phylogenetic relationship (shared descent), progenitor-descendant relationship (serial descent), and degree of evolutionary change.
Other systematists consider reification of paraphyletic groups to obscure inferred patterns of evolutionary history. [31] The term "evolutionary grade" is sometimes used for paraphyletic groups. [32] Moreover, the concepts of monophyly, paraphyly, and polyphyly have been used in deducing key genes for barcoding of diverse group of species. [33]
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
The publication of Darwin's theory of evolution in 1859 gave this view increasing weight. In 1876 Thomas Henry Huxley, an early advocate of evolutionary theory, proposed a revised taxonomy based on a concept strongly resembling clades, [7] although the term clade itself would not be coined until 1957 by his grandson, Julian Huxley.
In biology, taxonomic rank (which some authors prefer to call nomenclatural rank [1] because ranking is part of nomenclature rather than taxonomy proper, according to some definitions of these terms) is the relative or absolute level of a group of organisms (a taxon) in a hierarchy that reflects evolutionary
A phylogenetic tree, phylogeny or evolutionary tree is a graphical representation which shows the evolutionary history between a set of species or taxa during a specific time. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] In other words, it is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon ...
[1] [2] That happens when rapid evolution makes a new species appear so radically different from the ancestral group that it is not (initially) recognised as belonging to the parent phylogenetic group, which is left as an evolutionary grade. While the term is from bacteriology, parallel examples are found throughout the tree of life.