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NEW THINKING. "The prevailing view in the earlier literature on the evolution of bipedalism has been a particularly linear one, with the usual pattern being a neat series of steps from arboreal quadruped to obligate biped. As more fossil evidence accumulated, some researchers entertained the possibility of locomotor diversity in contemporary early hominins, but this view was far from prevalent." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0021-8782.2004.00296.x/full View in LinkedIn

GAIT DIVERSITY. "Based on this inferred diversity and supported by the existing evidence for postcranial diversity, it is not unreasonable to assume that there was also a considerable degree of locomotor diversity in the early hominins." A variety of designs had to exist. https://lnkd.in/eicfqZV View in LinkedIn

HOMINOID DIVERSITY. "Recent discoveries of taxa such as Kenyanthropus platyops, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Orrorin tugenensis and Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba suggest a far wider degree of taxonomic diversity in the African fossil hominin record than had previously been thought." Not so simple as once thought. https://lnkd.in/eicfqZV View in LinkedIn

GORILLA PORTAL. "Comparative analysis of the human, anthropoid, and other primate feet clearly indicates that the foot of man was evolved from a grasping, arboreal type such as is peculiar to the modern great apes. Furthermore, the great ape or gorilloid type of foot presents an intermediate stage in structural and functional modification through which, of necessity, the evolutionary development of the human foot had to pass." https://lnkd.in/eXEMMAm View in LinkedIn

THE FAIRY STORY. "It all used to seem so simple. The human lineage evolved in Africa. Only at a relatively late date did early humans finally migrate from the continent of their birth, in the guise of the long-known species Homo erectus, whose first representatives had arrived in eastern Asia by around one million years ago." https://lnkd.in/ejdbPT4 View in LinkedIn

NOT DESIGNED FROM SCRATCH. "The origin of our feet dates back to lobe-finned fishes, and has evolved into five-rayed, weight supporting structures since." https://lnkd.in/esuQhhw View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend on the evolution of the human foot as an example of the structural work-around that evolution imposed on development, and an illustration of the principle that nothing has been designed from scratch for its current purpose. While this theme is structural, it applies equally to every protein and genome. And every living mite on planet earth. View in LinkedIn

CHICKENS & EGGS. "A longstanding debate—often dubbed the chicken or the egg problem—is which came first, genetic heredity or metabolism? A conundrum arises because neither can operate without the other in contemporary life, where the duality is manifested via the genome–proteome systems." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

DARWIN ON VESTIGES. "Along with paleontological evidence from the fossil record and biogeographic evidence from species distributions, Darwin turned, naturally, to comparative anatomy, citing such well-known topics as homologous and analogous (convergent) features and similarities in skeletons and patterns of embryonic development. Darwin cited another prominent finding of comparative anatomy as an obvious line of evidence for evolution: vestigial features." http://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

GREY ZONE SHIFT. "We therefore identify the transition from non-life to life with a fundamental shift in the causal structure of the system, specifically a transition to a state in which algorithmic information gains direct, context-dependent, causal efficacy over matter." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn