See Evolution

Homplasy is the appearance of similar traits in organisms when their most common recent ancestor didn't have them.

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The causes of homoplasy are sometimes elaborated in the context of the difference between:

• parallel evolution, where homoplasy is thought to occur because

two organisms share a common genetic heritage, and

• (proper) convergent evolution, where the same solution is found by different

genetic means, and where the primary causal force is usually attributed to selection

See Convergence, adaptation, and constraint. This binary distinction may be too simplistic (see [36–39] for some recent discussion). For the GP map bias in the Arrival of the frequent, the reason for this repetition is not a contingent common genetic history, nor the Allmacht (german for omnipotence) of selection [40], but rather a different kind of ‘deep structure in biology’ [41].