Talk:Recurrent evolution

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The article is mostly a collection of meaningless sentences such as "Recurrent evolution is the noise that is evolution." I would like to see it erased. Dan Graur (uncited comment made on 16:43, 18 December 2013‎ by User:Dogrt)

Good lord, could you people please look at the literature instead of relying on your gut? The "proposed merger" discussion below seems to be based on arbitrary opinions about what "recurrent" means. In the actual literature of evolution, the terms "repeated evolution" and "recurrent evolution" are often used in a general way, e.g., the Gompel, et al. article that is already cited here uses both "repeated" and "recurrent." In a recent article Bernd and Snel write "Some of the most striking convergent and parallel (collectively recurrent) amino acid substitutions in proteins are adaptive, but there are also many that are selectively neutral." In an ideal world, IMHO, we would have one article on recurrent (repeated) evolution and it would cover convergence and parallelism. However, that would be a heavy lift at this point. I suggest instead to make the present article an entry point to the articles on parallel and convergent evolution, after explaining briefly that there have been disagreements (about how precisely to define parallel vs. convergent), and that "recurrent" and "repeated" evolution are often used as generic terms. Dabs (talk) 18:41, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

Proposed merger, March 2014

It has been suggested that this page be merged into convergent evolution. Proposed since March 2014.

Recurrent evolution has a few useful sentences and examples but, as Dan Graur pointed out, it is largely unstructured and it is not clear how it differs from convergent evolution. T. Shafee (Evo&Evo) (talk) 02:07, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

• Support - proposer appears to be an expert in this topic. Ivanvector (talk) 16:43, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
• Oppose - the 2 subjects are distinct, recurrent evolution refers to the same or related species evolving the same trait on separate occasions over time, while convergent evolution refers to unrelated species evolving similar features independently. Any merger would need to address that distinction, then treat each of them separately. The exposition would be clearer as independent articles. I don't see the example cited by Dan Graur in the current version, so perhaps recent edits have rendered his objections moot.--Wcoole (talk) 01:51, 20 November 2014 (UTC)
• Support - It should be merged, just change title to convergent v.s. divergent.Book Jumper (talk) 21:32, 6 March 2015 (UTC)
• Clarify support - At the very least, much of the current version of the article should be merged into convergent evolution. I see Wcoole's point about the distinction between whether the trait evolves repeatedly in the same species, or independently in multiple species. However, the majority of the current article and its examples are on independent evolution in multiple species. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 23:56, 19 October 2015 (UTC)
• Support - Two terms for the same subject, and this one is largely unsourced. Convergent evolution includes what Wcoole refers to. FunkMonk (talk) 20:07, 11 January 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose - The two pages describe separate, though related phenomena, just as Wcoole described. Parallel evolution is also a very similar, yet equally distinct phenomena, so there is precedent for keeping the pages separate and merely cross-referencing them to describe the differences, perhaps in the Re-evolution vs. convergent evolution section of convergent evolution. Regardless of the outcome of this merger, some attention needs to be paid to the examples given of recurrent evolution to make them more approachable to the layperson. I won't pretend to be an expert who understands them, but perhaps that alone could clear this whole debate up. --Nquinn91 (talk) 17:36, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Since there is no consensus for this (I'd oppose it, if this were a vote), I'm closing the discussion now and removing the templates in the two articles. Recurrence implies repeated reappearance of a trait in a species or closely related species, something quite different from separate development of traits with similar functions in unrelated species. The topics are thus not the same, and are independently notable. Chiswick Chap (talk) 05:50, 28 August 2016 (UTC)