Reversion, or sometimes reversal, is, in the field of the evolutionary biology, the return of a character state to an ancestral state manifested by a gene mutation in the DNA making it possible to recover the functions of a gene after that he lost them as a result of a first mutation. This phenomenon allowed biologists to determine mathematical laws of reversion by convergent atavism.
The discovery of the reversion calls into question Dollo's law, which, stated by a nineteenth-century Franco-Belgian paleontologist, posed the irreversible nature of evolution.
"Homoplasy is similarity that is the result not of simple ancestry, but of either reversal to an ancestral trait in a lineage or of independent evolution (convergence, similarity resulting from different developmental genetic mechanisms; or parallelism, similarity resulting from the same developmental genetic mechanisms)".[1]
At the morphological level
edit- Frogs: Gastrotheca guentheri.[2]
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- Snails.[3]
At the molecular level
editDNA
editProteins
editSee also
editReferences
edit- ^ Wake, David B.; Wake, Marvalee H.; Specht, Chelsea D. (2011-02-25). "Homoplasy: From Detecting Pattern to Determining Process and Mechanism of Evolution". Science. 331 (6020): 1032–1035. doi:10.1126/science.1188545. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 21350170.
- ^ Wiens, John J. (2011-05-01). "Re-Evolution of Lost Mandibular Teeth in Frogs After More Than 200 Million Years, and Re-Evaluating Dollo's Law". Evolution. 65 (5): 1283–1296. doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01221.x. ISSN 1558-5646.
- ^ Gould, Stephen Jay (23 November 1968). "Phenotypic Reversion to Ancestral Form and Habit in a Marine Snail". Nature. 220 (5169): 804–804. doi:10.1038/220804a0. ISSN 1476-4687.