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Parallelism, It's Evolutionary Origin And Systematic Significance, K. Kubitzki, P. Von Sengbusch, H. Poppendieck

Aliso: A Journal of Systematic and Floristic Botany

Parallelism as one of the forms of biological similarity is investigated in the light of recent findings from developmental and molecular biology. From the organismic point of view, functional constraints and evolutionary canalization are well established as causes of parallelism. To these may be added, from the molecular perspective, (a) erratic activations of repressed genes; (b) activations of alternative pathways under the influence ofhomoeotic genes; and (c) horizontal gene transfer, for which a simple mechanism is proposed. The control of gene expression through the action oftransposable elements, reversible to some degree, appears to be an evolutionarily important and frequent phenomenon, …