Fitch W M
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California at Irvine 92717, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1995 Jul 29;349(1327):93-102. doi: 10.1098/rstb.1995.0095.
The general impression of molecular evolution is often that one sequences a gene from a number of organisms and infers the evolutionary relations of the organisms. Indeed, if the sequences turn out to be orthologous and the data robust, one will get a phylogeny (tree) depicting those historical relations. But what one really obtains is a gene tree (I shall henceforth assume that the data are robust; that is another problem) and the biological messages implicit in that tree can be quite various. This article lists a number of those messages that one may have or may wish to look for.
分子进化的一般印象通常是，人们对多种生物体的某个基因进行测序，然后推断这些生物体的进化关系。确实，如果序列结果是直系同源的且数据可靠，就会得到一个描绘这些历史关系的系统发育树（树形图）。但人们真正得到的是一个基因树（此后我将假定数据是可靠的；这是另一个问题），而该树中隐含的生物学信息可能多种多样。本文列举了一些人们可能已经拥有或可能希望去寻找的此类信息。
