In a lovely bit of metaconvergence, two studies on convergent evolution showed up in the news this week. The first looked at ants in Arizona and whether five distinct populations separately stopped producing queens with wings in favor of wingless ones. The second was more extensive, showing that a wide range of species across phyla all have the same solution at the genetic level for coping with a toxin produced by some plants and toads. Both studies suggest that natural history was not purely random, and “replaying the tape” as it were might not always produce wildly different results.
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