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STRUCTURAL HOMOLOGIES. "The early formation of distinct germ layers, the establishment of body axes, the differentiation of photoreceptors or the deployment of similar neuronal architectures are examples attesting to deep homologies at the tissue and cellular level." https://lnkd.in/dT-s3Z5 View in LinkedIn

COMMON BODY PLANS. "Animals greatly exemplify how enormous morphological diversity can arise through evolution. However, despite their profound variation in forms, there are clear commonalities in how animal body plans are built." https://lnkd.in/dT-s3Z5 View in LinkedIn

BURST OF CREATIVITY. "The question of how the morphological 'design' of the thirty-five or so animal phyla arose in a burst of creative evolutionary activity in the geologically distant past." https://lnkd.in/d-B5nwz View in LinkedIn

ONLY 36 PHYLA OF ANIMALS. "There are 36 recognized animal phyla, of which but nine (Mollusca, Porifera, Cnidaria, Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, Annelida, Arthropoda, Echinodermata, and Chordata) contain the vast majority of described, extant species. Body plan is one approach to defining phyla." https://lnkd.in/dWhEMWG View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE explores the morphological explosion in animal body plans half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian period, and why this has essentially ground to a halt. In the second part of this two weekend posting, there is a deeper exploration of the subject from a genetic perspective ensues. Extinctions are much easier to explain than a massive expansion in biological diversity that arrives quickly and flattens out. What were the reasons for both the emergence and end of massive diversification? 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