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LOSS OF PLASTICITY. "Early animals may have been less restrained in their development as they were not yet “canalized” or “locked”. In other words, as the initial blueprints of the first body plans were being laid down, it became increasingly less likely that mutations resulted in major body plan alterations without catastrophic consequences for viability." https://lnkd.in/dTKCkih View in LinkedIn

THEORIES FOR THE SLOWDOWN. "Several theories have been put forward to explain the reduction in the rate of animal body plan diversification following the Cambrian, including the importance of changes in the environment, competition and ecology, the structure of fitness landscapes, and developmental canalization." https://lnkd.in/dTKCkih View in LinkedIn

WHY DID DIVERSIFICATION SLOW? "Assuming that the Cambrian explosion happened because the environmental conditions were permissive and because the “molecular toolkit” by that time was rich enough to produce diverse multicellular animals, it is perhaps surprising that morphological diversification did not continue in the same rate." https://lnkd.in/dTKCkih View in LinkedIn

DOUBTS. "There is considerable uncertainty about the number, nature, and timing of early creative 'explosions'." https://lnkd.in/d-B5nwz View in LinkedIn

DIMINISHED CREATIVITY. "Animal evolution was more 'creative' before 500 My ago than since then, when it has been rather conservative, so there is a broad parallel with development." https://lnkd.in/d-B5nwz View in LinkedIn

ENORMOUS TRANSITION. "Many agree it is only a matter of time before artificial life creates machines that are alive, are intelligent, reproduce their own kind, have their own purposes, set their own goals, and evolve autonomously." https://lnkd.in/dsMZPii View in LinkedIn

ACCUMULATED CHANGE. "The pace of change of human material culture appears faster in more recent periods than it does for older ones. More surprising, however, is the fact that the magnitude of accumulated cultural changes grows at an increasingly faster pace with time, which is more so than the magnitude of accumulated biological change." https://lnkd.in/du2rR_7 View in LinkedIn

CULTURAL EVOLUTION. "Once culture originates, it has the capacity to evolve on its own, and the past century has shown an explosion of technological culture, including notably the creation of computing machines and complex distributed informational networks connecting them." https://lnkd.in/dsMZPii View in LinkedIn

FASTER CHANGE. "Cultural evolution is expected to be faster than biological evolution because of its Lamarckian nature, and because cultural information is transmitted through different routes than genetic information." https://lnkd.in/du2rR_7 View in LinkedIn

GIANT TRANSITIONS. "Once life originated, biological evolution underwent a number of major evolutionary transitions, and presumably there are more to come. Even though the identification of “major” transitions involves some inescapable arbitrariness, probably everyone will agree that past transitions include the origin of eukaryotes, the origin of multicellular life, and the origin of language and culture." https://lnkd.in/dsMZPii View in LinkedIn