ABSTRACT
Mutation and recombination provide the genome with the means to evolve, but we learn very little about the evolutionary histories of genomes simply by studying these events in living cells. Instead we must combine our understanding of mutation and recombination with comparisons between the genomes of different organisms in order to infer the patterns of genome evolution that have occurred. Clearly, this approach is imprecise and uncertain, but as we will see, it is based on a surprisingly large amount of hard data and we can be reasonably confident that, at least in outline, the picture that emerges is not too far from the truth.
