Evolution of the chordate body plan: New insights from phylogenetic analyses of deuterostome phyla
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The deuterostome phyla include Echinodermata, Hemichordata, and Chordata. Chordata is composed of three subphyla, Vertebrata, Cephalochordata (Branchiostoma), and Urochordata (Tunicata). Careful analysis of a new 18S rDNA data set indicates that deuterostomes are composed of two major clades: chordates and echinoderms + hemichordates. This analysis strongly supports the monophyly of each of the four major deuterostome taxa: Vertebrata + Cephalochordata, Urochordata, Hemichordata, and Echinodermata. Hemichordates include two distinct classes, the enteropneust worms and the colonial pterobranchs. Most previous hypotheses of deuterostome origins have assumed that the morphology of extant colonial pterobranchs resembles the ancestral deuterostome. We present a molecular phylogenetic analysis of hemichordates that challenges this long-held view. We used 18S rRNA to infer evolutionary relationships of the hemichordate classes Pterobranchia and Enteropneusta. Our data show that pterobranchs may be derived within enteropneust worms rather than being a sister clade to the enteropneusts. The nesting of the pterobranchs within the enteropneusts dramatically alters our view of the evolution of the chordate body plan and suggests that the ancestral deuterostome more closely resembled a mobile worm-like enteropneust than a sessile colonial pterobranch.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".