Am Nat. 2019 Jan;193(1):11-19. doi: 10.1086/700718. Epub 2018 Nov 15.
The mechanistic link between natural selection and parallel evolution is well established. Natural selection is the only known deterministic process that can regularly overcome chance and historical contingency to generate the evolution of similar characteristics in independent populations inhabiting similar environments. However, the ready inference of natural selection from parallel evolution has been established only relatively recently. Here, I review the use of "parallel evolution" in the first 125 years of The American Naturalist and show that there were other well-accepted definitions of the term through the history of the field. I discuss the legacy of those alternative ideas and how they helped to shape evolution and ecology as we know them today and finish by discussing a geometric use for "parallel" that may reduce terminological confusion.
自然选择与并行进化之间的机制联系已经得到充分证实。自然选择是唯一已知的确定性过程，它可以经常克服偶然性和历史偶然性，在居住在相似环境中的独立群体中产生相似特征的进化。然而，从并行进化中推断自然选择的做法直到最近才得到确立。在这里，我回顾了《美国自然学家》创刊 125 年来对“并行进化”一词的使用，并表明在该领域的历史进程中，还有其他被广泛接受的定义。我讨论了这些替代观念的遗产，以及它们如何帮助塑造我们今天所知道的进化和生态学，并以讨论“并行”的几何用法结束，这可能会减少术语混淆。
