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  • Before making a single edit, Tropedia EXPECTS our site policy and manual of style to be followed. Failure to do so may result in deletion of contributions and blocks of users who refuse to learn to do so. Our policies can be reviewed here.
  • All images MUST now have proper attribution, those who neglect to assign at least the "fair use" licensing to an image may have it deleted. All new pages should use the preloadable templates feature on the edit page to add the appropriate basic page markup. Pages that don't do this will be subject to deletion, with or without explanation.
  • All new trope pages will be made with the "Trope Workshop" found on the "Troper Tools" menu and worked on until they have at least three examples. The Trope workshop specific templates can then be removed and it will be regarded as a regular trope page after being moved to the Main namespace. THIS SHOULD BE WORKING NOW, REPORT ANY ISSUES TO Janna2000, SelfCloak or RRabbit42. DON'T MAKE PAGES MANUALLY UNLESS A TEMPLATE IS BROKEN, AND REPORT IT THAT IS THE CASE. PAGES WILL BE DELETED OTHERWISE IF THEY ARE MISSING BASIC MARKUP.

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  • To go into a little detail about the common idea of evolution running in reverse: occasionally an ancestral trait can "re-evolve", sometimes known as atavism. This can happen if the potential for the trait is present in a species, but blocked during development (for instance, birds still have the potential for teeth, but the way they develop makes it impossible for those teeth to actually appear — they can be produced by manipulation of the embryos, though). One example where this actually happened is that stick insects have repeatedly lost and regained wings throughout their history. But this not at all evolution going backward. The new species doesn't resemble its ancestor just because it has gained back a lost feature, and indeed the feature is usually not identical to that in the ancestor. More cogently, there is no "path" that the species is running "backward" on, but rather it's using a potential present in its genes to respond to new pressures in a new environment.
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