Category: Uncategorized

PHYLUM-LEVEL BODY PLANS. "A notable feature of the paleontological record of animal evolution is the establishment by the Early Cambrian of virtually all phylum-level body plans." https://lnkd.in/dHpVwii View in LinkedIn

TWO PHASES OF DIVERSIFICATION. "After the initial “explosion” and formation of most animal body plans (phyla), the subsequent animal diversification only “filled in” the (morphological) space and resulted in more genera and families." https://lnkd.in/dTKCkih View in LinkedIn

CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION THEN STASIS. "Although there are disagreements as to the speed of this diversification, one thing that is clear is that since this time there have been only minor modifications to existing animal body plans." https://lnkd.in/dTKCkih View in LinkedIn

NO NEW PHYLA. "Despite the enormous amount of developmental and morphological innovation that has occurred since then within body plans, no new phyla appear to have originated since the Cambrian. Nonetheless, enormous evolutionary changes have gone on within the animal kingdom within these long-conserved underlying patterns." https://lnkd.in/d2_xbfe View in LinkedIn

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. "The Hamiltonian law of the double pendulum discovered with no prior knowledge of physics by an algorithm." https://lnkd.in/eGii4i4 View in LinkedIn

BEYOND COMPARE. "Stephen Jay Gould in his best-selling book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, noted the sudden appearance of these very distinctive types of animal, suggesting that the Cambrian explosion was a time of great experimentation never again repeated. Modern statistical analyses have not confirmed Gould’s hypothesis. Rather the animals look different and odd because they are difficult to compare with our modern fauna; living arthropods are just as different from each other as those of the Cambrian." https://lnkd.in/daSxgHq View in LinkedIn

RECOMBINANT INNOVATION. "Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and now their modern counterparts were able to create one breakthrough after another because they built innovation strategies around recombining existing technologies rather than inventing new ones." https://lnkd.in/eGbBMDi View in LinkedIn

CARNIVAL OF THE WIERD AND WONDERFUL. "Some 13 separate phyla are represented in these faunas including some very weird animals such as Anomalocarus, Hallucigenia, Opabinia, Odontogriphus and Wiwaxia. The apparent, sudden appearance of this carnival of the animals suggested a real explosion of new body plans or perhaps the animals had just acquired skeletons and the optimum size to be detected in the fossil record." https://lnkd.in/daSxgHq View in LinkedIn

HOD LIPSON TED TALK. https://lnkd.in/d9mJhxh View in LinkedIn

CAMBRIAN TRANSFORMATION. "Numerous phyla were present in the early Cambrian, whereas before the base of the Cambrian (dated at 543 My ago) only the enigmatic Ediacaran animals are found." https://lnkd.in/d-B5nwz View in LinkedIn