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Evolutionary Tree And Cladograms

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Evolution is a mysterious topic, as there is just so much evidence that has been found by many people throughout history. The first person to spread the idea of evolution was Charles Darwin. He helped to spread the idea of evolution to others such as Gregor Mendel, and helped many others to accept the findings of Boucher de Perthes. Evolution is defined by the changes of organisms throughout time to better the survival rate of said group of organisms.(definitions, 2009) The generations of organisms therefore evolve through time as the changes occur. There are many pieces of evidence such as, analogous and homologous structures in organisms, cladograms, the order of appearance of structures during embryological development, and fossil records. Evidence of evolution at it’s finest.
An analogous structure is something that has the same purpose or structure but not something that has evolved from …show more content…

A cladogram is a chart that show similarities through a selected species of organism or completely random organisms. They are basically tree like structures to show similar characteristics. Some of these characteristics may be opposable thumbs, hair, cells, or segmented bodies, although all characters can be used. There are many different names for these such charts: phylogeny, evolutionary tree, phylogenetic tree, and cladogram.(reading trees, 2006) In cladograms, there are clades, a clade is a group of species that shares a common ancestor. Each of these organisms share a common trait or traits with this ancestor. While cladograms show certain similarities between species, there is no defined strength of any of the similarities, thus all must be treated with equal meaning. This can lead to awkward situations of species which seem to bare no resemblance to each other being actually correct. This can show great evidence towards evolution only depending upon the organisms used in such a chart.

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