I’ve been playing with sequence data a lot recently. It’s been so long since I have done any real work with this stuff that I’ve fallen behind in my knowledge of the tools for analyzing the data.
I hope to post a couple of things here after I have been working on as a sort of tutorial on how to use ClustalX as an alignment tool that (I think) can even build phylogenetic trees from homology data.
Homologous vs Analogous Evolution
I received this video in my inbox his morning from Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True blog. It’s a quick two-minute video outlining how convergent evolution has resulted in extraordinarily similar features appearing in species long after their phylogenetic divergence. In other words, these adaptations are actually analogous, NOT homologous.
The original video appears on phdcomics, where you can find a treasure trove of lab-related humor.
DownHouseSoftware 