Category: Uncategorized

DREADFUL EXHIBITS. "Every human being embodies the history of our species in the form of stuff inherited from the past. We are walking museums of natural history but some of the exhibits are rather dreadful. And every other species—and there are millions of them—also carry vestiges of its life history." https://lnkd.in/d8JdtZG View in LinkedIn

MYTHS OF EVOLUTION: "Humans are not currently evolving." https://lnkd.in/d9kiUUZ View in LinkedIn

MYTHS OF EVOLUTION: "Evolution only occurs slowly and gradually." https://lnkd.in/d9kiUUZ View in LinkedIn

MYTHS OF EVOLUTION: "Individual organisms can evolve during a single lifespan." https://lnkd.in/d9kiUUZ View in LinkedIn

MYTHS OF EVOLUTION: "Evolutionary theory implies that life evolved (and continues to evolve) randomly, or by chance." https://lnkd.in/d9kiUUZ View in LinkedIn

JUST TO RECAPITULATE, some of the stumbling blocks for understanding evolution follow. They are useful to summarize, and 27 have been selected, in no particular order. View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR PLUS PHENOTYPIC. "When morphology meets molecular data in crinoid phylogeny: a challenge. Many clades of extant crinoids based on external skeleton morphology are polyphyletic. Using the hyocrinids and a recent extensive molecular phylogeny of the extant crinoids, we show that the molecular approach, when coupled with detailed ontogenetic analyses on a large sample of specimens and taxa, may help understand the evolutionary trends within a given group of organisms." https://lnkd.in/dVvNppR View in LinkedIn

RECAPITULATION REVERSED. "New ontogenetic data for the 350-million-year-old teleost relative Aetheretmon overturns this long-held hypothesis. Ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny; instead, differential outgrowth determines final morphology." https://lnkd.in/dB8GajJ View in LinkedIn

ASSUMED RECAPITULATION. "The symmetrical, flexible teleost fish ‘tail’ has been a prime example of recapitulation — evolutionary change (phylogeny) mirrored in development (ontogeny). Paleozoic ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii), relatives of teleosts, exhibited ancestral scale-covered tails curved over their caudal fins. For over 150 years, this arrangement was thought to be retained in teleost larva and overgrown, mirroring an ancestral transformation series." https://lnkd.in/dPmPtVr View in LinkedIn

REMAINING VALUE. "While the recapitulation theory has largely been discredited in modern biology to an extent to refer it defunct, successional stages of embryos do resurrect stages in the phylogeny, albeit the correspondence being vestigial and rudimentary." https://lnkd.in/dE2ft2W View in LinkedIn