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Evolutionary and anatomical textbooks tend to completely neglect, or include just a few pages about, the contributions of Muslim scholars for the discovery of human anatomy and particularly for the history of evolutionary thinking. This negligence is the result of complex historical biases, has profound implications, creates several misconceptions, and does not allow the general public and teachers, students and researchers to fully understand the true history of anatomical and evolutionary discovery. In an original project done at one of the most historical US universities - Howard - involving graduate students, faculty members, and their colleagues from other institutions, we did an extensive literature review of ancient texts written in various languages, particularly before Vesalius (about human anatomy) and Darwin (about evolutionary thinking), as well as of the few more recent reviews on the subject. Here we present, for the first time, the outcome of this review and discuss some of the Muslim schol...

Most evolutionary and medical textbooks state that the tetrapod fore and hindlimb are serial homologues. Here we show how regenerative studies of axolotls, developmental studies of tetrapods, and comparative and evolutionary studies of all major vertebrate groups, including recent re-analyses of the appendicular muscles of chondrichthyans, dipnoans and coelacanths contradict this old dogma. The integrative analysis of the data available strongly supports the idea that the similarity of the muscles and bones of the fore and hindlimbs of tetrapods such as salamanders and modern humans is not due to serial homology, but is instead the result of independent evolutionary changes (homoplasy) occurred mainly during the origin of tetrapods due to the co-option of similar genes for the development of both limbs. It also offers new insights about the ancestral Bauplan and morphogenetic gradients of tetrapod limbs, including the striking similarity of the zeugopodial (forearm/leg) and autopodial (hand/foot) muscles ...

Most human syndromes show a complex mix of symptoms that are not easily explained by a single gene mutation. Complex developmental networks that will be influenced by a mutation need long term stud...

We report the muscular and skeletal abnormalities observed in a very rare and precious 28-week human Trisomy 18 cyclopic fetus, and compare this individual with other humans with Trisomy 18 (Edward...

The notion of scala naturae dates back to thinkers such as Aristotle, who placed plants below animals and ranked the latter along a graded scale of complexity from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ animals, such as humans. In the last decades, evolutionary biologists have tended to move from one extreme (i.e. the idea of scala naturae or the existence of a general evolutionary trend in complexity from ‘lower’ to “higher” taxa, with Homo sapiens as the end stage) to the other, opposite, extreme (i.e. to avoid using terms such as ‘phylogenetically basal’ and ‘anatomically plesiomorphic’ taxa, which are seen as the undesired vestige of old teleological theories). The latter view tries to avoid any possible connotations with the original anthropocentric idea of a scala naturae

Most textbooks and papers state that the structures of the tetrapod fore- and hindlimb are serial homologues. We provide an updated discussion of this subject based on a literature review and on our regenerative studies of axolotls, developmental studies of tetrapods, and comparative and evolutionary studies of all major vertebrate groups, including recent re-analyses of the appendicular muscles of chondrichthyans, dipnoans and coelacanths. The integrative analysis of the data available strongly supports the idea that the similarity of muscles and bones of the fore and hindlimbs of tetrapods such as salamanders and modern humans is not due to serial homology, but is instead the result of independent evolutionary changes (homoplasy) due to a complex interplay between developmental, functional, topological and phylogenetic constraints. It also offers new insights about the ancestral Bauplan and morphogenetic gradients of tetrapod limbs, including the striking similarity of the zeugopodial (forearm/leg) and ...