Key Takeaways

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Taxonomy is a way of establishing the naming of organisms in terms of their ranks in different categories.

• The most often used system of taxonomy involves three domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and

Eukarya.

• Phylogeny refers to the evolutionary relationships between different organisms.

• Phylogenetic trees can be created using morphology, biochemistry, or genetics of different organisms.

• The molecular clock theory looks at the timing of different evolutionary changes over time.

• Cladistics looks at clades, which are groups of organisms that share a common ancestor.

• Molecular evolution looks mainly at the DNA sequences in an organism in order to find out when there were divergences in the genetics of the different descendants of an ancestor.