Parallelism as the pattern and process of mesoevolution

Over the last decade, evolutionary developmental biologists have increased the phylogenetic resolution of their studies from ‘‘coarse’ ’ comparisons between phyla and other distantly related taxa to ‘‘fine’ ’ comparisons between closely related species (Pennisi 2002; Wilkins 2002). This increase in phylo-genetic resolution has led to illuminating discoveries about the developmental genetic basis of parallelism (Wray 2007). Parallelism is most often defined as the convergent or inde-pendent evolution of similar morphological characters that share a common developmental basis (Futuyma 1998; Hall