In the Cambrian design lab

The so-called Cambrian Explosion produced the fundamental body plans of the species that exist today in a relatively short period of Earth’s history. A “hard-wired” gene structure was helpful in this process, but there are no plausible explanations for how it developed. During the Cambrian, however, environmental changes occurred that placed fundamentally new demands on population communication. As a result, neural systems were reorganised, and the dynamics of communication with the environment were recorded in DNA.