Theory
Consider two distinct haploid organisms who differ at a single nucleotide. By tracing the ancestry of these two individuals backwards there will be a point in time when the MRCA is encountered and the two lineages will have coalesced.
Read more about this topic: Coalescent Theory
Famous quotes containing the word theory:
“The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of Gods chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The weakness of the man who, when his theory works out into a flagrant contradiction of the facts, concludes So much the worse for the facts: let them be altered, instead of So much the worse for my theory.”
—George Bernard Shaw (18561950)
“It makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are,
beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)