Axial Character Seriation In Mammals: An Historical And Morphological Exploration of the Origin, Dev

Axial Character Seriation in Mammals is an unabridged edition of the 1986 Harvard University PhD Thesis of Aaron G. Filler, MD, PhD that pioneered our modern reassessment of mammalian vertebrae in the light of the new homeotic biology. As Dr. Filler points out in fascinating detail, the leading explanations of similarity among animals before Darwin were arrayed around the vertebrae of the spine in works by Sir Richard Owen, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This was the theoretical structure that was overturned and demolished by Darwin's ideas about similarity due to common descent. In a stunning reversal, modern homeotic genetics has shown that repeating structures Most remarkably, Filler shows how this 100 million year old process was dramatically altered in the course of the early evolution of the hominoid apes. Presenting historical, anatomical, embryological and paleontological evidence in support, the case is made that human evolution commenced its progress towards the differentiation between ape and human as a consequence of a reconfiguration of the splitting of the laminapophyis. One major functional consequence of the reconfiguration was a lumbar spine uniquely optimized for upright posture and bipedalism. The appearance of the human lumbar design in a Miocene (21 million year old) fossil attributed to the hominoid ape Proconsul major suggests that the upright posture and bipedalism demonstrated by many existing apes and evidenced by a number of fossil apes all shares a common origin and underlying structural basis.