= Phylogenetics
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<Phylogenetics> infers evolutionary relationships from evidence such as <anatomy> and <DNA> sequences. A <phylogenetic tree> summarizes a proposed pattern of ancestry; <phylogenetic characters> supply the observations, and an inference procedure states how alternative trees are compared.
For sequence data, a <nucleotide substitution model> assigns probabilities to changes along branches. The <phylogenetic pruning algorithm> efficiently sums over unknown ancestral states to compute a <likelihood function>. This connects a historical hypothesis to an explicit calculation rather than treating the most visually similar <species> as automatically closest relatives.<Evolutionary trees from DNA sequences: a maximum likelihood approach by Joseph Felsenstein>[Ancestral-state summation and likelihood recursion]{ref}
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