This symposium plans to bring to Konstanz leading international researchers from abroad and from Germany, Switzerland and Austria who have conducted research on the issue of convergent evolution to explain repeatedly evolved similarities in species and parallel evolved adaptations at the genetic and genomic level.

During this symposium the focus will be on modern genomic approaches in addressing the following observation: evolution occasionally repeats itself. This is termed convergent evolution and was already known to Charles Darwin. Only recently, however, has it become possible, in a small number of ecological model systems (Heliconius butterflies,  stick insects, stickleback and cichlid fish, etc.), to identify the evolutionary histories, genes, and even genomic (or mutational) changes, which underlie repeated parallel speciation of similar species and the iterative evolution of convergent adaptations. The recent revolution in next-generation long-read DNA-sequencing techniques has propelled the fields of comparative genomics and evolutionary biology and made it now possible to find genes that led to genome-wide patterns of differentiation during the repeated origin of similar species as well as to investigate the genetic/genomic basis of parallel evolved adaptations (i.e. convergent evolution).

The symposium is co-sponsored by the Leopoldina.