Overview

Abstract

Abstract The origins of biodiversity lie, of course, in evolutionary history. In the past, the fossil record has been our only source of information into evolutionary patterns, but fossil data are now being supplemented in an unexpected way: it is coming to be understood that phylogenies constructed from molecular data, of which we have an ever increasing, high-quality supply, also provide information about the evolutionary past. The theory which underpins such inferences, the theory of family trees, is also the basis of contemporary approaches in population genetics to using molecular data in making inferences about population structure, a subject of great importance to biodiversity studies. What sets the chapters in this section apart from classical studies of the tempo and mode of evolution, such as the work of Simpson (see, for example, Simpson (1945) in references to Chapter 1), is the use of quantitative statistical and theoretical models to both assess the quality of the data, whether molecules or fossils, and to make inferences from such data about evolutionary patterns.