https://users.dimi.uniud.it/~antonio.dangelo/Robotica/2012/helper/leggedRobot/Ijspeert08NN.pdf

2008 Special Issue: Central pattern generators for locomotion control in animals and robots: A review

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Biomechanics And Motor Control Of Human Movement

ION, GENERAL CONCEPTIONS, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, MENTAL INDIVIDUALITY. It would be very difficult for any one with even much more knowledge than I possess, to determine how far animals exhibit any traces of these high mental powers. This difficulty arises from the impossibility of judging what passes through the mind of an animal; and again, the fact that writers differ to a great extent in the meaning which they attribute to the above terms, causes a further difficulty. If one may judge from various articles which have been published lately, the greatest stress seems to be laid on the supposed entire absence in animals of the power of abstraction, or of forming general concepts. But when a dog sees another dog at a distance, it is often clear that he perceives that it is a dog in the abstract; for when he gets nearer his whole manner suddenly changes, if the other dog be a friend. A recent writer remarks, that in all such cases it is a pure assumption to assert that the mental act is not essentially of the same nature in the animal as in man. If either refers what he perceives with his senses to a mental concept, then so do both. (44. Mr. Hookham, in a letter to Prof. Max Muller, in the 'Birmingham News,' May, 1873.) When I say to my terrier, in an eager voice (and I have made the trial many times), "Hi, hi, where is it?" she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all around, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scent for any game, but finding nothing, she looks up into any neighbouring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly shew that she had in her mind a general idea or concept that some animal is to be discovered and hunted? It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth. But how can we feel sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures or pains in the chase? And this would be a form of self-consciousness. On the other hand, as Buchner (45. 'Conferences sur la Theorie Darwinienne,' French translat. 1869, p. 132.) has remarked, how little can the hardworked wife of a degraded Australian savage, who uses very few abstract words, and cannot count above four, exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence. It is generally admitted, that the higher animals possess memory, attention, association, and even some imagination and reason. If these powers, which differ much in different animals, are capable of improvement, there seems no great improbability in more complex faculties, such as the higher forms of abstraction, and selfconsciousness, etc., having been evolved through the development and combination of the simpler ones. It has been urged against the views here maintained that it is impossible to say at what point in the ascending scale animals become capable of abstraction, etc.; but who can say at what age this occurs in our young children? We see at least that such powers

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ase1887/22/257/22_257_458/_pdf

The descent of man and selection in relation to sex

Researchers studying aspects of locomotion or movement in biological and biomimetic systems commonly use video or stereo video recordings to quantify the behaviour of the system in question, often with an emphasis on measures of position, velocity and acceleration. However, despite the apparent simplicity of video analysis, it can require substantial investment of time and effort, even when performed with adequate software tools. This paper reviews the underlying principles of video and stereo video analysis as well as its automation and is accompanied by fully functional and freely available software implementation.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3182/3/3/034001/pdf

Software techniques for two- and three-dimensional kinematic measurements of biological and biomimetic systems.

To discover interordinal relationships of living and fossil placental mammals and the time of origin of placentals relative to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, we scored 4541 phenomic characters de novo for 86 fossil and living species. Combining these data with molecular sequences, we obtained a phylogenetic tree that, when calibrated with fossils, shows that crown clade Placentalia and placental orders originated after the K-Pg boundary. Many nodes discovered using molecular data are upheld, but phenomic signals overturn molecular signals to show Sundatheria (Dermoptera + Scandentia) as the sister taxon of Primates, a close link between Proboscidea (elephants) and Sirenia (sea cows), and the monophyly of echolocating Chiroptera (bats). Our tree suggests that Placentalia first split into Xenarthra and Epitheria; extinct New World species are the oldest members of Afrotheria.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/339/6120/662.full.pdf

The Placental Mammal Ancestor and the Post–K-Pg Radiation of Placentals

Small cursorial birds display remarkable walking skills and can negotiate complex and unstructured terrains with ease. The neuromechanical control strategies necessary to adapt to these challenging terrains are still not well understood. Here, we analyzed the 2D- and 3D pelvic and leg kinematic strategies employed by the common quail to negotiate visible step-up and step-down perturbations of 1 cm, 2.5 cm, and 5 cm. We used biplanar fluoroscopy to accurately describe joint positions in three dimensions and performed semi-automatic landmark localization using deep learning. Quails negotiated vertical perturbations without major problems and rapidly regained steady-state locomotion. When coping with step-up perturbations, the quail mostly adapted the trailing limb to permit the leading leg to step on the elevated substrate in a similar way as it did during level locomotion. When the quail negotiated step-down perturbations, both legs showed significant adaptations. For small and moderate perturbations (not inducing aerial running) the quail kept the function of the distal joints (i.e., their kinematic pattern) largely unchanged during uneven locomotion, and most changes occurred in proximal joints. The hip regulated leg length, while the distal joints maintained the spring-damped limb patterns. However, to negotiate the largest visible step perturbations, more dramatic kinematic alterations were observed. For these large perturbations, all joints contributed to leg lengthening/ shortening in the trailing leg and both the trailing and leading legs stepped more vertically and less abducted. This indicates a shift from a dynamic walking program to strategies that are focused on maximizing safety.

/pdf/limb-joint-and-pelvic-kinematic-control-in-the-quail-coping-dbmgx320.pdf

Limb, joint and pelvic kinematic control in the quail coping with step perturbations

Kinematisches Modell und Dynamiksimulation vierbeinigen Laufens von Säugetieren

Stepping Over Different Support Surfaces Kinematic Strategies in Newly Walking Toddlers

The zoological collections at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena have a complex history that dates back to the eighteenth century. Although material was gained in sum over long periods, storage capacities were always a limiting factor, material was often insufficiently documented, and some of it was lost or destroyed. Here, we report briefly on the history of the zoological collections and their importance and value in the light of the biodiversity crisis and legal impediments. Conservational problems include permanent curation, temperature and humidity fluctuations as well as pests and the use of poisons.

JENA: The Scientific Zoological Collections at the Phyletisches Museum in Jena: Historical Development and Conservational Challenges

Science relies on the validity of concepts, especially when these come from other disciplines. The differentiation of human groups according to phenotypic appearance, for example the colour of their skin, seemed so obvious that after centuries only genetics could fundamentally revise this concept. For 50 years, attempts have been made to break away from racial categorization, among others in the recent Jena Declaration of 2019 (Fischer et al., 2019). There is no biological justification for categorizing people into discrete groups; on the contrary, racism seeks a biological legitimation in its justification. This Special Issue takes up the enormous challenge of how to deal with the realization that ‘race’ in humans is not a scientifically tenable category but that ‘race’ permeates psychological processing (Editorial of this Special Issue) especially in fields of psychology, for which the term is constitutive, such as the ‘other-‘race’-effect’. Other sciences may be curious to see how psychology discusses the downgrading of ‘races’ to groups of increasingly higher resolution or, for example, the individual-differences approach, and finally how giving up a concept may open new doors and provide new opportunities. People have been categorizing each other based on appearance for millennia, as is still shown by the ongoing controversy on ancient Egyptian ‘races’. In the 19th century, early evolutionary thinking began to remodel this practice of classifying human groups using phenotypes, culminating in ideas of superior human ‘races’ and eugenics. An influential figure here is Herbert Spencer, who conceived the term ‘evolution’ before and differently from Darwin (Köchy, 2007), and from whom the expression ‘survival of the fittest’ originated. He founded ‘biological Spencerism’ in Victorian England (Freeman et al., 1974), Social Darwinism (even before German biologist Ernst Haeckel) and the supposedly biologically based form of white superiority. According to his theory, different groups of people would have inherent and distinct characteristics, which are displayed, for example, in the colour of their skin. Those characteristics would be linked to the population ancestry of its bearer. Differences between human populations were further imagined using biological concepts, such as morphospecies, reflecting a static worldview, in which species were defined by certain characteristics selected by systematists. In essence, human groups were seen as immutable ‘classes’ (Mahner & Bunge, 1997). This, however, does not reflect objective biology but rather represents a flawed construct of the human mind. Taxonomy is a rather static way of thinking, uninfluenced by the idea of evolution. The central question was, and still is, the relationship of between-group variation (intergroup variation) to individual variability within a group (intragroup variation). Our view of human biological history began, however, to transform in the 1960s with the advent of molecular biology and its application to population genetics (Lewontin, 1972). Molecular evidence provided new criteria to observe speciation processes and taxonomic divisions, which were readily applied to human populations. After early studies on simple biological markers such as blood groups, mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994), recent years have seen an explosion of studies on human genetic diversity due to the advent of high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies, deciphering the genomes of millions of people. These genomic studies focus on polymorphic sites in the human genome, that is variants in the DNA sequence, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that vary between individuals and that change over time according to stochastic processes of neutral evolution. Most of these SNPs are not located in genes and therefore have no effect on phenotype. Populations that have recently separated still have many SNPs in common, only over many generations this proportion would decrease. Each person carries between 4 and 7 million SNPs and millions of larger structural variants, compared to the human reference genome (The 1000 Genomes Project Consortium, 2015). There are orders of magnitude more such genetic variants than morphological traits on which classical taxonomy was based. With genomic analysis, the genetic history and relatedness of populations can be traced in detail, while also explicitly disproving earlier and current notions of ‘race’. Studies revealed that the genetic variability within any given human population is almost as high as the variation between human populations (The 1000 Genomes Project Consortium, 2015). Not even one position in the genome has been found that represents a fixed difference between all individuals of two continental populations. This fact also includes genetic variation contributed from extinct human lineages, such as Neanderthal DNA in non-Africans, and Denisovan DNA in contemporary people from Southeast Asia and Oceania. It is rather the frequencies of genetic variants that differ between human populations. Humans are a relatively young species in evolutionary terms; the genetic effects of geographic isolation that resulted from settling the entire world in the last 50,000 years are minor and have been often overwritten by secondary admixture events (Lazaridis et al., 2016). A small subset of this genetic variation will have phenotypic consequences. An example of local adaptation are genes involved in skin pigmentation polymorphism. Increased melanin levels giving rise to darker complexion are selected for in lower latitudes in order to protect from UV radiation, while lower melanin levels giving rise to lighter complexion are favourable in higher latitudes to facilitate Vitamin D synthesis which depends on UV exposure (see also Editorial of the Special Issue Box 1). The later mechanism is known since the 1930s (Murray, 1934), however, only analysis of human genomes from the past has shown that Ice Age European hunter gatherers were mostly dark-skinned, and the high prevalence of light-skin pigmentation was only reached in Europe during the Bronze Age (Mathieson et al., 2015). Our current understanding is that early dark-skinned farming societies had to adapt to low Vitamin D diets and higher latitudes by developing light-skin pigmentation to spread into central and northern Europe (Krause & Trappe, 2019). Categorizing human groups based on skin colour makes thus little sense, as this trait reflects latitude as a proxy for UV exposure rather than population history. Skin pigmentation is additionally far from a binary trait with countless tones that change gradually in relationship to proximity to the equator. Gradients of variability are the rule in human populations and not discrete boundaries. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) with increasing sample size and ethnic diversity, like a recent one concerning tobacco and alcohol consumption (Saunders et al., 2022), show that ancestry has weak predictive power, emphasizing that phenotypic- and underlying genetic variation are present deep within human ancestry rather than only existing between them. Last but not least, it is not only a problem of variability perception, but also of face recognition abilities and here of qualitative differences between the perception of familiar and unfamiliar faces (Jenkins et al., 2018), which are closely related to the topic of this Special Issue. The authors thank Diethard Tautz for discussions on the concept of ‘race’ in human populations. The authors furthermore thank Taylor Hermes, Ben Vernot and Stefan Schweinberger for comments and feedback on the manuscript. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Both authors declare no conflict of interest. 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/bjop.12635

Martin S. Fischer

Papers

Limb, joint and pelvic kinematic control in the quail coping with step perturbations

Kinematisches Modell und Dynamiksimulation vierbeinigen Laufens von Säugetieren

Stepping Over Different Support Surfaces Kinematic Strategies in Newly Walking Toddlers

JENA: The Scientific Zoological Collections at the Phyletisches Museum in Jena: Historical Development and Conservational Challenges

Human populations are not biologically and genetically discrete.