convergent

This is the same process that occurs over tens of thousands, even millions of years in living creatures, from slugs to dogs to you and me, producing the incredible diversity we see in the tree of life along with startling replays of the same idea, known formally as convergent evolution.

Convergent evolution is what we see when we observe that bats and birds have similar development of their arms into gliding wings, which initially allowed them to glide, and then to fly.

Groh’s area of study is the evolution of crocodiles and their relatives from two hundred million years ago to now, looking for example at the convergent evolution of long, narrow snouts in various different branches of their family tree.

McInerney was lead author on a study on convergent evolution in bacteria that helps us understand how this background might work, and to distinguish these two ways convergence may occur.

He and his team used machine learning to look at the genomes of a whole bunch of different strains of Escherichia coli, a bacteria in which different strains repeatedly evolve in convergent ways, to see whether this occurs by chance or by a process of natural selection.