"Geoffrey also recognized that the opposite orientations of gut and nervous system posed a problem for his claim that insects and vertebrates represent different versions of the same archetypal animal - and he proposed the first account of the inversion theory to resolve this threat to unification. ...Geoffroy pursued the... aim of establishing a "unity of type" that could generate both arthropods and vertebrates from the same basic blueprint. ...The single grand design includes a gut in the middle and the main nerve cords somewhere on the periphery."
Stephen Jay Gould

January 1, 1970

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Original Language: English

Sources

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 326

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould