Polyclad Neurobiology and the Evolution of Central Nervous Systems

The rationale for studying flatworm neurobiology has long been the fact that, anatomically, their nervous systems appear to be intermediate between those of the Cnidarians and the more centralized ones of higher metazoans. It has been thought that understanding flatworm nervous systems would lead to an appreciation of, and insight into, the events involved with the early evolution of brains and central nervous systems. One of the problems of this approach is that the early events that occurred during the initial centralization of nervous systems must have happened so long ago in time that present day organisms can only represent a mere shadow of the actual events. We do not know if centralization occurred several times and independently. Certainly one suspects that the centralization in the Cnidaria and in the Hemichordata might have been independent of those of other metazoans. It is not clear if this also implies that the initial centralization of the protostome and deuterostome lines is independent.

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