Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Phylogeny
/faɪˈlɒdʒəni/noun
The evolutionary history of a species or group, and the branching pattern that records it.
The Greek roots
φῦλον
phŷlon
race, tribe, stock
γένεσις
génesis
origin, coming into being
Literally: “origin of a tribe”
The story of the word
Ernst Haeckel coined it in 1866 alongside ontogeny, the development of the individual, and then claimed the one repeated the other, a slogan that dominated biology for decades before being cut down to a much smaller true remainder. φῦλον was a tribe or clan, the unit Athens organised its citizens into. Molecular data has since rewritten many phylogenies that anatomy had settled comfortably.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1866
Same family
phylumontogenygenesiscladistics
In a sentence
Sequencing the whole genome forced a rewrite of the group's phylogeny.