Dollo's law of irreversibility
Ley de Dollo
- Date
- 1893 · confidence high
- Place
- Brussels, Belgium
- Credited to
- Louis Dollo
- Field
- Life & health
What was discovered
Belgian palaeontologist Louis Dollo proposed in 1893 the principle that evolution never exactly retraces an earlier path, known as Dollo's law: an organism never returns to an identical ancestral state, even when it regains similar structures through convergence.
What it led to
- Studies of convergent evolution
- Debates on evolutionary reversibility
- Phylogenetic reconstruction methodology