A “dendrogram” is a binary tree that results from merging similar items in a hierarchy. In this assignment, students build a dendrogram that represents a “phylogenetic tree” of species across the animal kingdom. Starting with raw DNA strings from mitochondrial DNA obtained from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/, students first compare all pairs of DNA between species using the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm, with substitution costs between amino acids specified by “BLOSUM” tables obtained at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/repository/blocks/unix/blosum/blosum.tar.Z. Amazingly, simply from this information, students are then able to build up the “tree of life” using Kruskal’s algorithm by merging species in descending order of similarity according to these results from Needleman-Wunsch. Students then plot this tree to visualize the results, and they programmatically extract various clusters using recursion. Among other things, students quantitatively show that humans are in a cluster with our primeate cousins, finding the cluster: [‘Bonobo’, ‘Chimpanzee’, ‘Gorilla’, ‘Human’, ‘Neanderthal’, ‘Orangutan’].