Consideration of the neural crest and its skeletal derivatives in the context of novelty/innovation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I examine the neural crest and skeletal tissues derived from neural crest cells in the context of novelty/innovation by asking whether the neural crest is a novel tissue and whether the evolutionary origin of the neural crest required innovative developmental processes. As a vertebrate autapomorphy, the neural crest is a novel structure. I equate novelty with innovation and take a hierarchical approach. Some other workers separate the two, using novelty for new structures not found in an ancestor and not homologous with a feature in an ancestor, and innovation for the new processes required to generate the novel structure. While development clearly evolves, I do not separate those processes that result in the production of novel features from those that lead to change in existing structures, whether that change is a transition or transformation from one homologous feature to another (fins-->tetrapod limbs or locomotory appendages-->crustacean maxilliped feeding appendages). The existence of novelties causes us to consider the concept of latent homology. Neural crest cells form cartilage, dentine and bone. Cartilage is found in invertebrates and so is not a vertebrate innovation. No invertebrate cartilage mineralizes in vivo, although some can be induced to mineralize in vitro. Mineralization of cartilage in vivo is a vertebrate innovation. Dentine is a novel tissue that only forms from neural crest cells. Bone is a vertebrate innovation but not one exclusive to the neural crest. The developmental processes responsible for the neural crest and for these skeletal tissues did not arise de novo with the vertebrates. Novelty/innovation results from tinkering with existing processes, from the flexibility that arises from modifications of existing gene networks, and from the selective advantage provided by gene duplications or modifications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".