"How ironic. In order to avoid the "nutty" theory of inversion, Gaskell invented the even odder notion of stomachs turning into brains with new guts forming below. No wonder then, that later biologists cast a plague on both speculative houses and opted instead for the obvious alternative: arthropods and vertebrates do not share the same anatomical plan at all, but rather represent two separate evolutionary developments of similar complexity from a much simpler common ancestor that grew neither a discrete gut nor a central nerve cord."
Stephen Jay Gould

January 1, 1970

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Original Language: English

Sources

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327

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