Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
Evol Dev. 2012 Jan-Feb;14(1):29-33. doi: 10.1111/j.1525-142X.2011.00520.x.
Parallelism has been the subject of a number of recent studies that have resulted in reassessment of the term and the process. Parallelism has been aligned with homology leaving convergence as the only case of homoplasy, regarded as a transition between homologous and convergent characters, and defined as the independent evolution of genetic traits. Another study advocates abolishing the term parallelism and treating all cases of the independent evolution of characters as convergence. With the sophistication of modern genomics and genetic analysis, parallelism of characters of the phenotype is being discovered to reflect parallel genetic evolution. Approaching parallelism from developmental and genetic perspectives enables us to tease out the degree to which the reuse of pathways represent deep homology and is a major task for evolutionary developmental biology in the coming decades.
近年来，有许多研究关注并行现象，重新评估了这个术语和过程。并行现象被认为与同源性有关，而趋同被视为同源性和趋同性之间的过渡，被定义为遗传特征的独立进化。另一项研究主张废除并行现象这个术语，将所有字符独立进化的情况都视为趋同。随着现代基因组学和遗传分析的发展，人们发现表型特征的并行现象反映了平行的遗传进化。从发育和遗传的角度来研究并行现象，可以帮助我们了解途径的重复利用在多大程度上代表了深层同源性，这是未来几十年进化发育生物学的主要任务。
