Filogenias: conceptos y generalidades

Abstract

Any research in biology is an exercise of comparison that includes the study of evolution. The investigation of evolutionary patterns in either of its two approaches (micro or macroevolutionary) raises methodological challenges for any researcher interested in these topics. These approaches have a common interest in understanding the origin the relationships between the studied organisms, although the temporal scales and the level of organization in which they focus are different. Currently, phylogenies are the most robust tool to explain ancestor-descendant relationships between a set of organisms. These diagrams, which are two-dimensional (cladograms) or multidimensional (networks), can be estimated with different approximations (maximum parsimony, máximum likelihood, and bayesian inference) according to the data available and the purpose of the investigation. This review presents an introduction to the methods available for the construction of phylogenies, including the traditional perspective that uses diagrams based on dichotomies and the new trends that try to visualize more complex patterns through evolutionary networks.