Modularity, homology, heterochrony: Gavin de Beer's legacy to the mammalian skull
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modularity (segmentation), homology and heterochrony were essential concepts embraced by Gavin de Beer in his studies of the development and evolution of the vertebrate skull. While his pioneering contributions have stood the test of time, our understanding of the biological processes that underlie each concept has evolved. We assess de Beer's initial training as an experimental embryologist; his switch to comparative and descriptive studies of skulls, jaws and middle ear ossicles; and his later research on the mammalian skull, including his approach to head segmentation. The role of cells of neural crest and mesodermal origin in skull development, and developmental, palaeontological and molecular evidence for the origin of middle ear ossicles in the evolutionary transition from reptiles to mammals are used to illustrate our current understanding of modularity, homology and heterochrony. This article is part of the theme issue 'The mammalian skull: development, structure and function'.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".