Despite substantial progress in understanding the genetic basis for differences in morphology, physiology, and behavior, many phenotypes of interest are difficult to study with traditional genetic approaches because their origin traces to deep nodes in the tree of life. Moreover, many species are not amenable to either large-scale sampling or laboratory crosses. We argue that phylogenetic methods and theory provide tremendous power to identify the functional genetic variation underlying trait evolution. We anticipate that existing statistical comparative approaches will be more commonly applied to studying the genetic basis for phenotypic evolution as whole genomes continue to populate the tree of life. Nevertheless, new methods and approaches will be needed to fully capitalize on the power of clade-scale genomic datasets.

中文翻译：

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系统发育学是新的遗传学（对于大多数生物多样性而言）。

尽管在理解形态，生理和行为差异的遗传基础方面已取得重大进展，但许多感兴趣的表型仍难以用传统的遗传方法进行研究，因为它们的起源可追溯到生命树的深层结节。此外，许多物种都不适合大规模采样或实验室杂交。我们认为，系统发育方法和理论提供了巨大的能力来识别性状进化背后的功能遗传变异。我们预计，随着整个基因组继续遍布生命树，现有的统计比较方法将更普遍地用于研究表型进化的遗传基础。然而，将需要新的方法和方法来充分利用进化枝规模的基因组数据集的力量。