@DkOkenia I have argued here and elsewhere that morphogenesis is determined by physical effects that are mobilized by cell masses expressing different subsets of conserved "developmental toolkit" genes. Noise, mutations, plasticity, don't change the inhere
@AndrejSpiridon4 cell clusters existed many potential forms were possible. But you still needed additional large-effect genes to go from basal metazoans to diploblasts, triploblasts, etc. Strangely, some of these genes seem to have appeared de novo: https:
@AndrejSpiridon4 @inzl @niles_eldredge @Jente_O The inherent physical properties of multicellular aggregates make the production of recurrent morphological motifs of animals and plants nearly inevitable. See, for example, https://t.co/LimJCvunqs and https:
@WiringTheBrain @GaryMarcus I don't see how you can say that. There is a vast literature from developmental biology and evodevo that says this is not the case. I link to one of my own papers, but it reviews and attempts to synthesize the work of many other