 Population biologists were among the first to operationalize methods for extracting information about the history of lineages from the internal structure of those lineages, i.e., by examining the structure of individuals in a populations, population biologists developed methods for inferring historical coalescent points of those individuals (Hudson 1983; Kingman 1982, 2000; Tajima 1983). These methods exploit the fact that after a lineage splits it takes time for that split to be wholly reflected in the kinship relations of the parts of those lineages. Or, to put it in more familiar terms, it takes time for the parts of a lineage to all be more closely related to each other than any are to parts in other lineages These approaches can be viewed as the continued development of methods in the larger context of the close ties between the application of statistical tools and molecular biology  (§1.2.3).