El análisis filogenético: métodos, problemas y perspectivas

In the last century, Darwin and Haeckel were the first to propose the phylogenetic trees. The first phylogenies were made intuitively, but in the fifties several researchers tried to propose rules for their reconstruction. The evolutionary school in tended to use the principies of evolution, the numerical (or pheneticist) school advanced the "distance methods", while the cladistic school proposed the "parsimony method". The UPGMA and the Neighbor:Joining are the more commonly used distance methods. The parsimony method tries to find the tree that requires the smallest number of changes. There are other methods that take in to account the evolutionary forces, like the maximum likelihood (Felsenstein, 1981). In this paper we discuss some of the problems associated to phylogeny reconstruction, the advantages of the different methods and of some of the computer available programs, and finally we offer a perspective on the uses of the phylogenies.