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Having addressed the question of how new species might arise, this lecture now turns to the question of how biologists organize the enormous diversity of living things. Older views on classification based on apparent similarities among groups of organisms suffer from the fact that these similarities may arise through convergent evolution. The lecture introduces phylogenetic systematics, a newer approach for reconstructing evolutionary history and relationships among a group of organisms based on statistical analysis, and shows the utility of this approach for understanding historical patterns of evolution.
