On the Theory and Computation of Evolutionary Distances

This paper gives a formal definition of the biological concept of evolutionary distance and an algorithm to compute it. For any set S of finite sequences of varying lengths this distance is a real-valued function on S × S, and it is shown to be a metric under conditions which are wide enough to include the biological application. The algorithm, introduced here, lends itself to computer programming and provides a method to compute evolutionary distance which is shorter than the other methods currently in use.