Gaphyl: An Evolutionary Algorithms Approach For The Study Of Natural Evolution

Gaphyl is an application of genetic algorithms (GA's) to phylogenetics, an approach used by biologists to investigate the evolutionary relationships among organisms. Typical phylogenetic software packages use heuristic search methods to navigate through a space of possible trees in an attempt to nd the most plausible evolutionary hypotheses, as exhaustive search is not practical in this domain. Gaphyl substitutes an evolutionary search mechanism, with the result that on a complex problem from the literature (the major clades of the angiosperms), Gaphyl is able to nd a more complete solution (more equally plausible hypotheses) in less time than the standard approach. Contributions of GA operators are investigated, as are some possibilities for hybrid systems.