Lec 32 MIT 7.012 Introduction to Biology, Fall 2004
So we're shifting gears today. We're going to talk about molecular evolution, i.e. how do we understand how species evolve, how do we understand a lot about ourselves, how human evolution is taking place over the last couple hundred thousand years. And traditionally, evolution has been the purview of people who study the morphology of organisms, and when I talk about morphology, obviously I'm talking about shape and form. And by comparing organisms, starting already 250 years ago, one began to develop hierarchies of how different organisms on the planet are related to one another. You've seen this, undoubtedly, in high school biology. This is the study of phylogeny, and phylogeny has traditionally been figured out by comparing the phenotypes, the morphologies of adults, sometimes embryonic development, and on that basis, attempting to extrapolate back in evolutionary time, about the relatedness of different organi...