“The genesis and evolution of the phylum, tribe, or species; ancestral or racial evolution of an animal or plant type, or of particular organs or other components of a plant or an animal.” - Oxford English Dictionary
http://evolution.genetics.washington.edu/phylip/software.html - repository of links to hundreds of phylogeny programs. These algorithms infer evolutationary trees from various organism characteristics. Common methods include parsimony, R statistics, generalized least squares,