New perspectives on the evolution of protochordate sensory and locomotory systems, and the origin of brains and heads
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cladistic analyses generally place tunicates close to the base of the chordate lineage, consistent with the assumption that the tunicate tail is primitively simple, not secondarily reduced from a segmented trunk. Cephalochordates (i.e. amphioxus) are segmented and resemble vertebrates in having two distinct locomotory modes, slow for distance swimming and fast for escape, that depend on separate sets of motor neurons and muscle cells. The sense organs of both amphioxus and tunicate larvae serve essentially as navigational aids and, despite some uncertainty as to homologies, current molecular and ultrastructural data imply a close relationship between them. There are far fewer signs of modification and reduction in the amphioxus central nervous system (CNS), however, so it is arguably the closer to the ancestral condition. Similarities between amphioxus and tunicate sense organs are then most easily explained if distance swimming evolved before and escape behaviour after the two lineages diverged, leaving tunicates to adopt more passive means of avoiding predation. Neither group has the kind of sense organs or sensory integration centres an organism would need to monitor predators, yet mobile predators with eyes were probably important in the early Palaeozoic. For a predator, improvements in vision and locomotion are mutually reinforcing. Both features probably evolved rapidly and together, in an 'arms race' of eyes, brains and segments that left protochordates behind, and ultimately produced the vertebrate head.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".