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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
A Most Surprising Fern: Serendipity And Browsing In Botanical Search, Douglas Tuers
A Most Surprising Fern: Serendipity And Browsing In Botanical Search, Douglas Tuers
Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science
This article is a case study of botanical field work in the eastern United States in the early twentieth century. These cases will be analyzed as instances of browsing and serendipity. Browsing and serendipity have a rich literature in information science and this article will draw on this literature in order to better understand serendipity in botany. This article will show how botanical localities support browsing and serendipity for the botanists who search them. This article will also show how botanical institutions and botanists interface with localities in order to further support browsing and serendipity. As a whole this article …
Understanding Phylogenies: Constructing And Interpreting Phylogenetic Trees, Joseph L. Staton
Understanding Phylogenies: Constructing And Interpreting Phylogenetic Trees, Joseph L. Staton
Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science
Interpretation of phylogenetic trees is fundamental in understanding the relationships between organisms, their traits or characteristics, their ecology and even their genomic and developmental biology. As trees appear more often in basic texts, many students, and even their teachers, clearly understand little of how they are constructed and even less about what can be inferred from them about the history of the representatives analyzed. Not only are these trees a source of confusion on what they do tell us, often non-specialists infer things wrongly or, worse, others misuse them in an attempt to negate the validity of evolutionary theory. In …