Crabs taste like lobsters because they both evolved from the same group of crabby-lobstery-tasting crustaceans. The jargon phrase for this is convergent evolution)
(You will see that the trait only occurs in isolation, on tree tips.
The trait developed independently more than once. (You will see that the trait is spread over connected branches of the tree. The trait developed just once, and was then inherited by the creatures that subsequently evolved. These markings on the evolutionary tree then show you whether: If you are interested in a particular trait, you can go through the tree and mark every kind of creature which has that trait. University of Chicago Press, 1991.) Such a chart will usually turn out to be tree-shaped, and so it is called a "tree" of evolutionary ancestry (the jargon phrase for this kind of "tree" is "a phylogeny"). For a good introduction to it, see Phylogeny, Ecology, and Behavior: A Research Program in Comparative Biology, by Daniel R. (How to make this kind of chart is a whole question in itself. In essence, it tastes like tetrapod.įirst, you need to make a diagram showing which kinds of organisms evolved from which other kinds of organisms. Here's how you do it.Ĭat tastes mammalian. Modern evolutionary analysis helps us try to sort out and understand the true origins of all sorts of traits. Other things they have in common were not inherited from any common ancestor-but happened to have developed independently for each organism.Ī meat counter featuring some of the author's favorites, including turtle, emu and boar. 
Some of the things they have in common were inherited from a common ancestor while.If you compare the traits of two different kinds of organisms, you may find that: Other of its traits developed late in the evolutionary history. Some of an organism's traits are inherited from many, many, many, many (thousands, or millions, even) generations of ancestors. The different traits of an organism (its hair or lack thereof, its teeth or lack thereof, its lungs or lack thereof, its taste, its color, etc.) can have distinctly different evolutionary origins. Did each species evolve this trait independently or did they all inherit it from a common ancestor? That is the burning question. It is curious that so many animals have a similar taste. The field of culinary evolution faces one great dilemma: why do most cooked, exotic meats taste like cooked Gallus gallus, the domestic chicken? Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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