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Updated: Jul 10, 2026

Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations
Published on: February 3, 2023
Convergence and parallelism reconsidered: what have we learned about the genetics of adaptation?
1Department of Biology, University of California - Riverside, 900 University Avenue, Riverside CA 92521, USA. Jarendt@ucr.edu <Jarendt@ucr.edu>
Abstract:
Biologists often distinguish 'convergent' from 'parallel' evolution. This distinction usually assumes that when a given phenotype evolves, the underlying genetic mechanisms are different in distantly related species (convergent) but similar in closely related species (parallel). However, several examples show that the same phenotype might evolve among populations within a species by changes in different genes. Conversely, similar phenotypes might evolve in distantly related species by changes in the same gene. We thus argue that the distinction between 'convergent' and 'parallel' evolution is a false dichotomy, at best representing ends of a continuum. We can simplify our vocabulary; all instances of the independent evolution of a given phenotype can be described with a single term - convergent.
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