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Pastimes : Current Events and General Interest Bits & Pieces -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win Smith who wrote (465)	3/4/2003 11:36:48 AM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 603

With an Evolutionary Milestone, the Race for Survival Began nytimes.com [ Elsewhere on the head front, if not the cheesehead or headcheese front . . . Sometimes, when reading SI, I wonder if this head thing is perhaps overstated. Maybe this explains it, though. ] Scientists studying this gigantic, densely branched tree of evolution believe that the appearance of the head was a major milestone in the history of animal life. It marked the beginning of active feeding and predatory behavior, setting off a survival race that accelerated the pace of evolution. . . . As nature molded the head from a primitive nerve cluster to a well-organized unit for sensing and computation, the head itself became a driving force in the evolution. Its sophistication was accompanied by a rise in predatory behavior, which led to an explosive diversification of species in the animal kingdom. "Predation set off an evolutionary arms race," said Dr. Peter Holland, a zoologist at the University of Oxford in England. "The game went like this: `I'll eat you unless you defend yourself or swim away or hide. But if you do that, I then need to be even better at sensing, chasing and catching.' And so it went on."