Parallel Evolution
Companies with similar origins making the same strategic moves may reflect parallelism rather than convergence.
Parallel evolution occurs when closely related lineages independently evolve similar traits from shared ancestral potential, as distinguished from convergent evolution where distantly related lineages evolve similar traits.
Threespine sticklebacks colonized thousands of freshwater lakes after glacial retreat ~10,000 years ago. In many lakes, populations independently evolved reduced armor - but this is parallelism, not convergence: the armor reduction is caused by mutations in the same gene (EDA) in most populations, and the low-armor allele existed as standing genetic variation in the ancestral marine population. Selection favored the pre-existing variant rather than generating new mutations.
Business Application of Parallel Evolution
Companies with similar origins making the same strategic moves may reflect parallelism rather than convergence. All SaaS startups adopting freemium models isn't true convergence - they share a common 'ancestral' SaaS playbook and face the same customer acquisition economics. Parallelism is more predictable than convergence because shared starting points plus similar environments reliably produce similar outcomes.