Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development

• Observation described by Attanasio Hodgkin describing processes of convergent evolution that could occur across disconnected ecosystems
• Developed 2093 following a visit to Loracus Prime prompted by the discovery of a local species of termite with near-identical morphology to Earth termites (ENT: "Strange New Worlds"; Federation - The First 150 Years)
• Describes how species with similar biochemistry filling similar niches in a unrelated environments will often develop the same morphological solutions to those environments even absent evolutionary pressure or similar lines of descent
• Hodgkin later attempted to expand the law to cover sociological convergent evolution as well
  • Efforts were largely dismissed by xenoanthropologists as a faulty analogy
  • General concept of parallel xenoanthropological development was formally structured into the Palmieri Hypothesis by the 24th century by Palmieri (SCE Short Story: "Fables of the Prime Directive")