cliff@noe.com (Cliff Lundberg) worte:
Have you considered siamese-twinning? This is certainly a dramatic mutation,
creating an organism with more parts, but it is simply the result of a
truncated
process of development, such that multiple embryos fail to differentiate
fully.
Here you have a mechanism that takes you from single to multiple cells.
Of course this assumes that the mutation is heritable, but why not?
On the higher level of gross metazoan anatomy, this mechanism can
explain segmentation, repetition, and symmetry within organisms.
This mechanism could generate explosive (as in Cambrian explosion)
increases in anatomical complexity, which would be followed by the
rapid loss of unneeded parts, an easily understandable process.
Cliff Lundberg ~ San Francisco ~ cliff@noe.com
Hi Cliff,
Sounds interesting, and somewhat above my level of expertise. (Anything
sounds more interesting to me than "random mutation and natural selection".)
Wouldn't some non random mechanism be necessary to specify how the new
parts would be used? Otherwise the possibility of the function they
performed turning out to be being useful would be extremely unlikely.
Bertvan