Question

a) What are the advantages and disadvantages of morphological and molecular systematic?

b) why phylogenetic are important with regards to conservation efforts?

c) in term of conservation effort, what can scientist do to reduce the risk faced by species?

Answer 1

Ans a:

Morphological systematic

Advantages
By the use of fossil and carbon dating, the time of divergence of lineages can be estimated.
The morphology of ancestral and extinct species can be predicted by the fossil data.

Disadvantages
Morphological characters of organisms are usually convergent.
Due to the scarcity of fossil records, it is not very clear.
Sometimes it a very difficult to differentiate between different character states.

Molecular systematic

Advantages
More data is available.
Because of the redundancy of genetic code, molecular traits are less susceptible to convergence. So the phenotypic traits which look identical may have different gene bases.
As the rate of mutation can be calculated, the number of mutations can be used to determine time of divergence.

Due to large number of sequence data, there are more potential characters available to infer relationships.

Disadvantages
Alignment of molecular data is complex.
It is not able to provide information about the morphology of the extinct species

Ans b:

The evolutionary history can help determine which sets of organisms are most important in maintaining the ecosystem. It is always better if we can preserve more secies, but it is often not possible. So the species which can keep the ecosystem diverse and productive are more important to conserve. The evolutionary relationships among the ecosystem's organismsp can play a role in determining.
Phylogeny measures the evolutionary distance between species. Long branches on the phylogenetic tree mean lots of evolution. Short branches mean little change. By mapping a group of organisms on these phylogenies, we can get an idea of evolutionary diversity of a group of organisms. Phylogenetic conservation strategy is relatively easy to practice. It is important as we have less time to preserve Earth's biodiversity.