Molecular sequences, morphological   measurements, geographic distributions, and fossil remains all provide a   wealth of potential information about the evolutionary history of life on   Earth, the dynamics of ancient and modern biological populations, and the   emergence and spread of infectious diseases. One of the challenges of modern   Evolutionary Biology is the integration of these different data sources to   address evolutionary hypotheses over the full range of spatial and temporal   scales. The field is witnessing a transition to an increasingly quantitative   science. This transformation began first through an explosion of molecular   sequence data with the parallel development of mathematical and computational   tools for their analysis. However, increasingly, this transformation can be   observed in other aspects of Evolutionary Biology where large global   databases of complementary sources of information, such as fossils,   geographical distributions, and population history, are being curated and made   publicly available.

分子序列、形态测量、地理分布和化石遗迹都提供了大量关于地球生命进化史、古代和现代生物种群动态以及传染病出现及传播的潜在信息。现代进化生物学的一个挑战是整合这些不同的数据源，以解决全时空尺度上的进化假设。这一领域见证了一个越来越向定量科学过渡的过程。这种过渡是从分子序列数据爆炸式增长，伴随相应分析的数学和计算工具的开发开始的。然而，这种转变越来越多地可以在进化生物学的其他方面观察到，在这些领域，大量的全球互补信息源数据库（如化石、地理分布和种群历史）正在被建立和公开。