Shall we appreciate any less the beauty of nature because its harmony is unplanned? And shall the potential of mind cease to inspire our awe and fear… - Stephen Jay Gould

. . . the great British entomologist Sir Vincent Wigglesworth (wonderful name for an insect man, I always thought) . . .

Many similarities of basic design among animal phyla, once so confidently attributed to convergence, and viewed as testimony to the power of natural selection to craft exquisite adaptation, demand the opposite interpretation that Mayr labeled as inconceivable: the similar features are homologies, or products of the same genes, inherited from a common ancestor and never altered enough by subsequent evolution to erase their comparable structure and function. The similarities record the constraining power of conserved history, not the architectural skills of natural selection independently pursuing an optimal design in separate lineages. Vertebrates are, in a certain sense, true brothers (or homologs) - not mere analogs - of worms and insects.

The nematode enters the insect's mouth, anus, or spiracle and migrates into the hemocoel. There the nematode injects millions of bacterial symbionts from its own intestine into the insect's circulatory system. These bacteria, though harmless to the nematode, kill the insect within hours.