So, this may or may not look like something, that makes any sense to you.
We have our human, you know, with relationship right
here, to the chimpanzee group, which seems to make
sense, the gorillas here, the crocodiles down here with
the horse, so this is a little hard to read.
The relationship seems to be right, but we want, we're used
to seeing things with a specific root, and we included the crocodile
for a reason, so that we could root our tree.
So what I'm going to is I'm going to go
to the re-root button up here and I'm going to
make the crocodile my out group, so the
crocodile's going to be at the base of my tree.
And when I do this, it turns into something that makes sense.
If you can imagine the trees that you saw before, that there's a root
coming out, going to the left over in this part, so it makes more sense.
So we have our crocodile as our out group,
the horse, being a mammal, shares a
common ancestor with everything here, which makes sense.
The lemur, as a primative primate, makes sense over here.
If we see who's related the humans, it's
the chmipanzee and the bonobo, which makes sense.
We know that they're our closest living relative
and the gorilla is next, so that makes sense.
And we
know that bonobo and the chimpanzee are
each others closest living relative, and so
they're on the same branch of the tree, in the same plate if you will.
So this tree seems to make sense and gives a
good depiction of, you know, what we know about evolutionary relationships.
So there's a couple of other things you can do,
and it's why I like this set of software for teaching.
If we want to flip nodes around,
so as Joel said, you can rearrange the
tree, but it still shows the same evolutionary relationship.
So I can, you know, if I want to flip the horse down to
the bottom, I can do that, I want to put the lemur above that.
So, I can keep changing the nodes, until I
get a tree that looks something like this.
It's actually why I like this tree because you know, if you looked at just this,
you'd say, oh, humans are, are you know, this elite branch on the top of the tree.
But by moving just a couple branches around, as Joel mentioned, we can see
that the humans are just another species on a tip, somewhere on the tree of life.