馃К New paper by Dera et al. in Science Advances proposing a geometric complexity space to map the full morphological diversity of life.
Striking result: life occupies only a tiny, clustered region of all geometrically possible forms, with large heteromorphic regions systematically avoided. The authors argue that this reflects deep physical and developmental constraints shaping evolution.
@FabMusacchio i don鈥檛 understand any of it, but the figures are top notch!
@FabMusacchio
Ah the morphospace group, I never get tired of this line of work
@FabMusacchio What I'm taking away from this is that there are large numbers of shapes that it wouldn't make any sense for life to adopt. Which isn't all that surprising.
@FabMusacchio I admittedly have only skimmed the paper so far, but it also seems interesting that motile animals seem occupy only a small sliver of the total design space. And this kind of intuitively makes sense, motile animals do not benefit from a large external surface-area-to-volume ratio the way that (some) sessile animals or plants do for capturing floating nutrients/groundwater/sunlight.
@FabMusacchio it's almost as if biological adaptation is not generated by random walks isotropically exploring the design space ;)
