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In genomics, DNA–DNA hybridization is a molecular biology technique that measures the degree of genetic similarity between DNA sequences. It is used to determine the genetic distance between two organisms and has been used extensively in phylogeny and taxonomy. [1]
The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1980) is a collection of 31 essays by the Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.It is the second volume culled from his 27-year monthly column "This View of Life" in Natural History magazine.
For the 1993 edition of Pandas, Behe wrote a chapter on blood clotting, presenting arguments which he later presented in very similar terms in a chapter in his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box. Behe later agreed that they were essentially the same when he defended intelligent design at the Dover trial. [16] [17]
Convergent evolution—the repeated evolution of similar traits in multiple lineages which all ancestrally lack the trait—is rife in nature, as illustrated by the examples below. The ultimate cause of convergence is usually a similar evolutionary biome , as similar environments will select for similar traits in any species occupying the same ...
Similarity measures play a crucial role in many clustering techniques, as they are used to determine how closely related two data points are and whether they should be grouped together in the same cluster. A similarity measure can take many different forms depending on the type of data being clustered and the specific problem being solved.
Homoplasy, in biology and phylogenetics, is the term used to describe a feature that has been gained or lost independently in separate lineages over the course of evolution. This is different from homology , which is the term used to characterize the similarity of features that can be parsimoniously explained by common ancestry . [ 1 ]
Genetic distance is a measure of the genetic divergence between species or between populations within a species, whether the distance measures time from common ancestor or degree of differentiation. [2] Populations with many similar alleles have small genetic distances. This indicates that they are closely related and have a recent common ancestor.
Local alignments are more useful for dissimilar sequences that are suspected to contain regions of similarity or similar sequence motifs within their larger sequence context. The Smith–Waterman algorithm is a general local alignment method based on the same dynamic programming scheme but with additional choices to start and end at any place. [4]