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Oldest known cardiovascular system already brain-focused | ScienceMag


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09 April 2014



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“The brain was well supplied with looping blood vessels, which extended branches into the arthropod’s alienlike eyestalks and antennae and rivaled the complexity of today’s crustaceans. From this Gordian architecture, the researchers can now speculate about the critter’s lifestyle. Its brain required abundant oxygen, so it presumably did a fair amount of thinking.”

John Payne‘s insight:

As if to underscore the importance of pairing information processing with mobility, this 520 million year old cardiovascular system was already highly developed for providing oxygen to the brain, suggesting that these creatures were also spending a disproportionate percentage of their energy budgets on correlating sensory input, a situation which could only arise if it somehow provided a significant evolutionary advantage.  It may be a stretch to generalize this to robotics, but you can judge for yourself whether providing the resources necessary to integrate data from disparate sources in a timely manner confers an  advantage worth the expense and effort.

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John Payne

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