Question

Which of the following is an incorrect statement?

(a) In a phylogram, the branch lengths represent the amount of evolutionary divergence

(b) Trees like cladogram are said to be scaled

(c) The scaled trees have the advantage of showing both the evolutionary relationships and information about the relative divergence time of the branches

(d) In a cladogram, the external taxa line up neatly in a row or column

This question was addressed to me by my college director while I was bunking the class.

Query is from Forms of Tree Representation in portion Molecular Phylogenetics of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct choice is (b) Trees like cladogram are said to be scaled

Easiest explanation: In a cladogram, the external taxa line up neatly in a row or column. Their branch lengths are not proportional to the number of evolutionary changes and thus have no phylogenetic meaning. In such an unscaled tree, only the topology of the tree matters, which shows the relative ordering of the taxa.