Phylogenetic trees and the tropical geometry of flag varieties

We will discuss some recent theorems relating the space of weighted phylogenetic trees to the tropical varieties of each flag variety of type A. We will also discuss the tropicalizations of the functions corresponding to semi-standard tableaux, in particular we relate them to familiar functions from phylogenetics. We close with some remarks on the generalization of these results to the tropical geometry of arbitrary flag varieties. This involves the family of Bergman complexes derived from the hyperplane arrangements associated to simple Dynkin diagrams.