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A phylogeny of the Neotropical Electric fishes

         The products of biodiversity are collected from the wild, but biodiversity itself is studied and documented in the lab.

         Biosystematics the study of the evolutionary relationships among organisms.  Phylogenetic systematics, also called Cladistics, is a method of inferring the evolutionary relationships of species or higher taxa by the presence of shared derived characters (i.e. synapomorphies). Phylogenetic systematics is the way biologists reconstruct the history of transformations that have resulted in the distribution and diversity of life.

         Systematics, then, is nothing less than the study of the history of all life.  Evolution is a continuing process and living populations may undergo change each and every generation.  Yet the current time horizon is but a moment in the great span of geological time and almost all evolutionary transformations occurred in the past.  Naturally these events cannot be reproduced in the laboratory.  Evolutionary biology is like geology and astronomy in being an historical, rather than an hypothetico-deductive science. 

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