Usually treated as a measure of evolutionary divergence, i e phylogenetic distance increases with increasing evolutionary divergence Distances are usually expressed pair-wise among the terminal taxa, and can be calculated based on a specified evolutionary model; the model specifies the probabilities of character-state changes through evolutionary time Distances are popular for building phylogenetic trees from molecular sequence data (cf maximum likelihood, parsimony)
the property created by the space between two objects or points size of the gap between two places; "the distance from New York to Chicago"; "he determined the length of the shortest line segment joining the two points"