Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Correspondence between parts or organs arising from evolutionary convergence.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The quality of being homoplastic; agreement in form and structure without community of origin, as of organs or parts of two different organs: opposed to homogeny: correlated with analogy or heterology as distinguished from homology in biological senses. The conceptions expressed by the terms homoplasy and homogeny are little different from those for which analogy and homology were earlier and more widely used, as in such a familiar instance as that of the wing of the bat being analogous to the wing of the butterfly and homologous with the fore leg of a horse. But the conceptions now rest upon evolutionary considerations, and are more precisely predicable, as when an organ of one animal may be similar in form as well as function to that of another, and hence homoplastic, though having a different origination, and hence not homogenetic. See extract under homoplastic.
Wiktionary
- n. A correspondence between the parts or organs of different species acquired as the result of parallel evolution or convergence.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Biol.) See homogeny.
Examples
“The amount of homoplasy character states which evolved independently, as might occur occasionally with pseudogenes can be estimated, and we can tell whether or not we are close or far from a situation in which there is so much homoplasy that no phylogenetic structure is statistically supported.”
If and only if Cornelius Hunter made sense, then... - The Panda's Thumb
“Morphological homoplasy, life history evolution, and historical biogeography of plethodontid salamanders inferred from complete mitochondrial genomes.”
“Extreme morphological and ecological homoplasy in tropical salamanders.”
“Partly because of my reading-up on other areas of direct interest (like cryptic diversity [see previous post], the discovery of new species, declines in global biodiversity, Cretaceous biogeography, radical homoplasy, polymorphism, and evolutionary reversals), I am returning again and again to the salamander literature.”
“These exceptions have been dealt with in one of two ways – first in some cases it can be argued that there is insufficient amount of sequence to rigorously support the true branch relationships i.e. sequence noise or homoplasy is hiding the true pattern or alternatively, these are informational genes that also have been involved in HGT events.”
“Serial homology, for instance, was a case of homoplasy.”
Form and Function A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology
“For this relationship Mr. Bay Lankester has proposed the term "homoplasy.”
“Wake, whose interest is homoplasy - the independent origin of similar shapes and structures”
“Most of the character conflicts in the data are within the separate sets, and only 2. 33-4.19 % increased homoplasy was found in the total data set including all taxa.”
“Using a new scoring algorithm, RawGeno, we show that scoring errors - in particular "bin oversplitting" (i.e. when variant sizes of the same AFLP marker are not considered as homologous) and "technical homoplasy" (i.e. when two AFLP markers that differ slightly in size are mistakenly considered as being homologous) - induce a loss of discriminatory power, decrease the robustness of results and, in extreme cases, introduce erroneous information in genetic structure analyses.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘homoplasy’.
-
• De rerum natura
What is this list about?
Interesting words in nature and natural science (in any language!).
What kind of words am I supposed to add?
You can add species names that you lov...lagerstätte, parthenogenesis, bushbaby, lepidoptera, dinoflagellate, pupation, chrysalis, ephemeroptera, deinococcus radio..., homoplasy, sciophilous, syncytium and 218 more...
-
Physical anthropology
acclimatization, adriatic, aegyptid, aeta, aethiopid, africoid, ainuid, aistin, alae, alare, albino, allele and 202 more...
-
Words of Dinosaurology
This quickly got bigger and weirder than originally intended, so now it's housing terms that relate to the study of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. See also Dinosaurs, Pterosaurs, Ichthy...
zygopophyses, ziphodont, plesiomorphic, cleidoic, endothermy, ectothermy, viviparous, vertebrae, cervical, dorsal, sacral, caudal and 628 more...
-
words for evolution&paleontology
polymorphism, paraphyletic, monophyletic, stasis, mutation, drift, diversity, darwinian, lamarkian, bambachian, convergence, homoplasy and 11 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for homoplasy.
mollusque "Homoplasic" gets about 600 hits in Google Scholar, versus about 2200 for "homoplasious" and 100 for "homoplasous", another contender. ("Homoplastious" is not represented.) "Homoplastic" gets 4900, but maybe 75% of those pertain to tissue transplantion. Google Scholar is biased toward medical literature, so it's hard to tell if the sample is representative. Feb 9, 2008
lucapozzi I think the right one (at least the most used in scientific literature)is homoplasic but I reported the definition that I found in EvoWiki: I'm Italian so I don't trust too much in my English!!! Feb 8, 2008
mollusque The adjective is homoplasious or homoplastic, the former sometimes being preferred because homoplastic also refers to transplantation of tissue from one individual to another of the same species. Feb 8, 2008
lucapozzi Homoplasy occurs when characters are similar, but are not derived from a common ancestor. The characters are said to be homoplastious. If the characters were similar and were derived from a common ancestor, they would be homologous. Homoplasies that are due to convergent evolution are termed analogies.
I love this word even if working in phylogenetics is my nightmare!!!
Feb 8, 2008