[həʊˈmɒpləsɪ]
From Greek ὅμοιος 'same, similar' and πλάσις 'moulding, conformation, form'.
In cladistics, a homoplasy is the occurrence of the same derived character state in two (or more) unrelated taxa. The same phenomenon is also known as convergent evolution, and in textual criticism as polygenesis. Salemans also uses as synonyms 'parallelism' and 'coincident variation' (1996, 8-9).
References
– Kitching, Ian J., Peter L. Forey, Christopher J. Humphries, and David M. Williams. 1998. Cladistics: The Theory and Practice of Parsimony Analysis. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
– Salemans, Ben J.P. 1996. “Cladistic and the Resurrection of the Method of Lachmann: On Building the Stemma of Yvain”. In Studies in Stemmatology, edited by Pieter van Reenen, and Margot van Mulken, 3–70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
In other languages
DE: Homoplasie
FR: homoplasie
IT: om(e)oplasia