Clades

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A classification that includes all descendants of a common ancestor is essential for understanding biodiversity and evolution within a specific lineage
2. This term refers to a segment of the evolutionary tree that identifies all species derived from a shared ancestor, highlighting their genetic relationships
3. A set of living beings that are all descended from the same original ancestor, used to study evolutionary links

Etymology: Julian Huxley, the British biologist better known for popularising evolution in mid-twentieth-century Britain, coined "clade" in 1957 in a paper called "The Three Types of Evolutionary Process in Nature." He needed a single word for a group made up of an ancestor and all of its descendants, and he reached back to Ancient Greek "kládos," meaning "shoot" or "branch." The image is of a limb growing from a trunk, with every twig that sprouts from it belonging to the same branch. The word is a learned borrowing, so it came into English directly from Greek scholarship rather than through everyday speech. It is a doublet of "cladus," the Latin form of the same Greek root, which English already had in a few technical senses. Because "clade" is a plural-friendly noun, "clades" is simply its plural, used whenever a biologist compares several such branches side by side.

Synonyms: lineages, groups, branches