It has long been assumed that serial homologues are ancestrally similar—polysomerism resulting from a “duplication” or “repetition” of forms—and then often diverge—anisomerism, for example, as they become adapted to perform different tasks as is the case with the forelimb and hind limbs of humans. However, such an assumption, with crucial implications for comparative, evolutionary, and developmental biology, and for evolutionary developmental biology, has in general not really been tested by a broad analysis of the available empirical data. Perhaps not surprisingly, more recent anatomical comparisons, as well as molecular knowledge of how, for example, serial appendicular structures are patterned along with different anteroposterior regions of the body axis of bilateral animals, and how “homologous” patterning domains do not necessarily mark “homologous” morphological domains, are putting in question this paradigm. In fact, apart from showing that many so‐called “serial homologues” might not be similar at all, recent works have shown that in at least some cases some “serial” structures are indeed more similar to each other in derived taxa than in phylogenetically more ancestral ones, as pointed out by authors such as Owen. In this article, we are taking a step back to question whether such assumptions are actually correct at all, in the first place. In particular, we review other cases of so‐called “serial homologues” such as insect wings, arthropod walking appendages, Dipteran thoracic bristles, and the vertebrae, ribs, teeth, myomeres, feathers, and hairs of chordate animals. We show that: (a) there are almost never cases of true ancestral similarity; (b) in evolution, such structures—for example, vertebra—and/or their subparts—for example, “transverse processes”—many times display trends toward less similarity while in many others display trends toward more similarity, that is, one cannot say that there is a clear, overall trend to anisomerism.

中文翻译：

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解构长期存在的先验假设，即序列同源性通常涉及祖先相似性，然后是解剖学差异

长期以来，人们一直假设序列同源物在祖先上是相似的——多聚体是由形式的“重复”或“重复”引起的——然后经常发散——例如，当它们适应执行不同的任务时，就像人类的前肢和后肢。然而，这种对比较、进化和发育生物学以及进化发育生物学具有重要意义的假设，通常并未真正通过对可用经验数据的广泛分析得到验证。也许并不奇怪，最近的解剖比较，以及分子知识，例如，如何将连续的附肢结构与双侧动物体轴的不同前后区域形成图案，以及“同源”模式域如何不一定标记“同源”形态域，正在对这种范式提出质疑。事实上，除了表明许多所谓的“序列同源物”可能根本不相似外，最近的工作表明，至少在某些情况下，某些“序列”结构在派生类群中确实比在系统发育上更相似。正如欧文等作者所指出的那样，更多的是祖先的。在本文中，我们首先要退一步质疑这些假设是否真的正确。我们特别回顾了所谓的“系列同源物”的其他案例，如昆虫翅膀、节肢动物的行走附属物、双翅目胸毛，以及脊索动物的脊椎、肋骨、牙齿、肌节、羽毛和毛发。我们证明：(a) 几乎没有真正祖先相似的情况；(b) 在进化中，这样的结构——例如，椎骨——和/或其子部分——例如，“横向过程”——很多时候表现出不太相似的趋势，而在许多其他方面表现出越来越相似的趋势，也就是说，人们不能说存在明显的、整体的异构趋势。