One person from your group will change one or two words in the worminal sentence and make the following entries:

- Write his/her name, and the changes they made, on the cladogram in Fig. 2

- Write the new sentence in the topmost empty worminal in the cladogram

- Write the new sentence, and his/her name, on a individual worminal and drop it in the box

The next person in the group will start with this modified sentence, and repeat the above procedure. Evolve your worminals through each group member twice (not in the same order), so that you end up with a total of eight worminals.

RULES FOR EVOLVING WORMINALS:

1) You can change a word, but not add or delete words

2) Try to keep the sentence intelligible, with proper grammar

3) Each individual group member should make a total of three changes - i.e. if you changed two words the first time, make only one change the second time, and vice versa.

4) It's O.K. to change a word that has previously been changed, but don't make a concerted effort to do so (in reality, the less you know about previous changes the better).

You now have a set of eight worminals on individual slips of paper. You also know how they are related to each other because you've been keeping track of their evolution on the cladogram in your lab book. Now comes the interesting part ...

Exchange boxes of individual worminals with a neighboring group. You now have a box of worminals for which you initially know nothing about how they evolved. This is exactly the same situation faced by practicing biologists in trying to reconstruct the phylogeny of actual organisms such as species of birds, or snails, or oaks. Can you use phylogenetic reasoning to reconstruct the history of how the other group evolved their worminals?

Begin by making a data matrix of the variation among the worminals. Worminals are convenient for us, because each segment is a character and the words on each segment are the character states. For example, segment one might have two character states: Bio. or Math. Fill in the data matrix below (there are 10 spaces in case you have a group of five).. You will need to label each of the worminals A, B, C, etc. to keep track of it.