The Importance of Convergence and Its Effects on Vertebrates

The Importance of Convergence and its effect on Vertebrates and Arthropods

Nature has a wonderful way of exerting its influence on animals and one of the many ways it does that is through convergent evolution. Convergent evolution is the subset of biological evolution known as Homoplasy. It is the independent evolution or similar features in species of different lineages with no common ancestor (Solomon et al., 2011) (Figure 1). Convergent evolution consists of rare functional sequences that occur repeatedly due to natural selection or intelligent design. Theories of convergent evolution and its mechanism include the reusing of the same gene segments in different systems hence causing similarities in different species within or outside of the same phylum. The crux of convergent evolution involves the evolution of analogous structures in animals that are from different lineages and species but have similar selection pressures and hence found a way to adapt to such selection pressures by evolving similar structures. The crucial idea from this is that the animals have completely different ancestors, different patterns of development and even different structures.

The origin of convergent evolution is believed to be the Cambrian explosion, the sudden occurrence of animals from originating from different ancestors with similar traits. The Cambrian explosion is an evolutionary event that dated back to 542 million years ago which resulted in many cases of convergent evolution in animals (Maloof et al., 2010). This is a hypothesis supported by the prevalence of phylogenetic distribution in the Cambrian explosion and similarity of genomes in various animals that are considered to have evolutionarily converged even though they have different ancestors (Couso, 2009).

In this essay, I will elaborate on the morphological as well as the functional aspects of convergent evolution in both arthropods and vertebrates. In order to appreciate the phenomenon of convergent...