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:::"More specifically, in evolutionary biology, homology has come to mean any similarity between characters that is due to their shared ancestry." Birds' wings are not similar characters, they are the same character. But, of course they're also similar characters and homologous because they have a shared common ancestry, that's why we call them birds, and why we call their forelimbs wings, because they are all birds, but it doesn't show the reader of the article anything to say that the eyes of all apes are homologous, the flippers of all whales are homologous, the tails of all fish are homologous, or the wings of all birds are homologous. What shows homology is to look at characters that we, as humans looking at characteristics of animals, don't already call all the same thing, to show their shared ancestry. The forelimbs of vertebrates is the classic example, the wings of birds and the fore limbs of whales and the human arm are all homologous. We don't necessarily think of them as homologous and of the shared common ancestry of these vertebrates if we're not used to thinking of evolution-and this article is about thinking about evolution. That the wings of birds are all derived from the birds having a shared common ancestry does not have any power in it. Birds' wings are not called different things, they're called wings. But a human forelimb is commonly called an arm, and bird's forelimb is commonly called a wing, and even a bat's forelimb is called a wing, but is a very different animal from a bird's forelimb.
:::To introduce the concept that things that are different may have a shared common ancestry by giving things that are all the same as an example is pointless. Birds' wings show the great diversity of characters within a group, but they're not a teaching moment in homology. The reader won't go from there to noting the shared common ancestry of humans and birds in time, they'll just go from their to the shared common ancestry of all cats, all apes, all frogs. --[[User:Amaltheus|Amaltheus]] ([[User talk:Amaltheus|talk]]) 20:54, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
::I would prefer the bat whale human --- seen any of them laying around? --[[User:Random Replicator|Random Replicator]] ([[User talk:Random Replicator|talk]]) 21:25, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
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