Year: 2022

FIGURES 2-3 and 5-6 shows a nice evolutionary series of the foot metatarsal, cuboid, calcanei and tali bones in closely related species. Worth a look. https://lnkd.in/eC74CRQ View in LinkedIn

NOT ELEGANTLY SIMPLE. "The foot is a complex mechanical structure. It consists of 26 bones (not including the sesamoid and accessory bones), over 30 joints, about 100 ligaments and additional elements (fascia, skin, fat pads). Thirty one muscles are active in the foot, of which 12 are extrinsic and 19 intrinsic." A structure built by a committee. https://lnkd.in/e3bN-6u View in LinkedIn

"UPRIGHT POSTURE developed across the entire skeletal-muscular system, and included considerable behavioral adaptations, with enormous consequences for Homo Sapiens." https://lnkd.in/ecBfjwe View in LinkedIn

THE SEEMINGLY SIMPLE ACT of walking has been very hard for robotic scientists to either comprehend or to mimic. It has generated some seriously heavy mathematical models. https://lnkd.in/etRHUtn View in LinkedIn

GAIT CONTROL. "There is evidence to suggest that humans control walking behaviors through a hierarchical subdivision between cortical control and central pattern generators in the spinal column, indicating that when humans perform motion primitives, i.e., steady-state well-practiced walking behaviors—potentially simple and characterizable control strategies are implemented." https://lnkd.in/esks9FG View in LinkedIn

PIECEMEAL ASSEMBLY. "The anatomical features seen in modern human feet seem to appear in a piecemeal fashion, and it has recently been proposed that there are different types of mosaic morphologies in the feet of several fossil hominin taxa, and potentially at different lineages with different types of bipedalism." https://lnkd.in/e8qSKap View in LinkedIn

THE OBSCURE FOOT. "The complexity of the multiple joints formed between the 26 bones of the foot, and their latticework of ligaments and tendons, and the fact that the plantar surface is quite deeply covered with soft tissues, means that joint motion in vivo, and even centres of joint rotation, are extremely difficult to determine." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joa.12201/full View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS the first week on the human foot. Nothing is as it seems to be. We usually marvel at nature's inventiveness, with good reason. But no living morsel under the sun has been purpose-built. All are transitional morphs borrowed from previous inventions, after aeons of tinkering for new functions. All are morphs in restless transitions, destination unknown, with a thousand blind ends, and a few startling successes. View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY CANDIDATES. "There are no generally accepted measures of biological complexity. Two possible candidates are the number of protein-coding genes, and the richness and variety of morphology and behaviour." https://lnkd.in/eZ5-m7K View in LinkedIn

GENOMES ACROSS TAXA. "The trend is fairly robust: eukaryotes have a larger coding genome than prokaryotes, higher plants and invertebrates have a larger genome than protists, and vertebrates a larger genome than invertebrates." https://lnkd.in/eZ5-m7K View in LinkedIn