ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Early animal evolution and the origins of nervous systems.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- From metabolic intermediary to neurotransmitter: purinergic signaling in neurophysiology and vulnerability of brain circuits.Bioscience reports · 2026Review
- On the molecular basis of enduring memory in neurons, and cell fate in fibroblasts.Nucleic acids research · 2026Review
- An Increase in Animal Diversity was Facilitated by Ecologically-Driven Brain Complexity Throughout the Cambrian.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Review
- Evolution of Oligodendroglia and Myelin.Advances in neurobiology · 2025Review
- Biophysics of Evolution of Intellectual Systems.Biophysics · 2022Article
- Towards the Idea of Molecular Brains.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- The chemical brain hypothesis for the origin of nervous systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Evolution of heterogeneous perceptual limits and indifference in competitive foraging.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Survival and selection biases in early animal evolution and a source of systematic overestimation in molecular clocks.Interface focus · 2020Article
- Neural architecture and regeneration in the acoelProceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Nociceptive Biology of Molluscs and Arthropods: Evolutionary Clues About Functions and Mechanisms Potentially Related to Pain.Frontiers in physiology · 2018Review
- Modelling the effects of short and random proto-neural elongations.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2017Article
- Phylogenetic origins of biological cognition: convergent patterns in the early evolution of learning.Interface focus · 2017Review
- Evolutionary convergence and biologically embodied cognition.Interface focus · 2017Review
- The animal sensorimotor organization: a challenge for the environmental complexity thesis.Biology & philosophy · 2017Article
- Ecological innovations in the Cambrian and the origins of the crown group phyla.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Early metazoan life: divergence, environment and ecology.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Review
- Embracing the comparative approach: how robust phylogenies and broader developmental sampling impacts the understanding of nervous system evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Review
- Introduction to 'Origin and evolution of the nervous system'.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Article
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Abstract
Understanding the evolution of early nervous systems is hazardous because we lack good criteria for determining homology between the systems of distant taxa; the timing of the evolutionary events is contested, and thus the relevant ecological and geological settings for them are also unclear. Here I argue that no simple approach will resolve the first issue, but that it remains likely that animals evolved relatively late, and that their nervous systems thus arose during the late Ediacaran, in a context provided by the changing planktonic and benthic environments of the time. The early trace fossil provides the most concrete evidence for early behavioural diversification, but it cannot simply be translated into increasing nervous system complexity: behavioural complexity does not map on a one-to-one basis onto nervous system complexity, both because of possible limitations to behaviour caused by the environment and because we know that even organisms without nervous systems are capable of relatively complex behaviour.
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