A network analysis of early arthropod evolution and the potential of the primitive

Abstract It is often thought that the primitive is simpler, and that the complex is generated from the simple by some process of self-assembly or self-organization, which ultimately consists of the spontaneous and fortuitous collision of elementary units. This idea is included in the Darwinian theory of evolution, to which is added the competitive mechanism of natural selection. To test this view, we studied the early evolution of arthropods. Twelve groups of arthropods belonging to the Burgess Shale, Orsten Lagerstätte, and extant primitive groups were selected, their external morphology abstracted and codified in the language of network theory. The analysis of these networks through different network measures (network parameters, topological descriptors, complexity measures) was used to carry out a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and a Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA), which allowed us to obtain an evolutionary tree with distinctive/novel features. The analysis of centrality measures revealed that these measures decreased throughout the evolutionary process, and led to the creation of the concept of evolutionary developmental potential. This potential, which measures the capacity of a morphological unit to generate changes in its surroundings, is concomitantly reduced throughout the evolutionary process, and demonstrates that the primitive is not simple but has a potential that unfolds during this process. This means for us the first empirical evolutionary evidence of our theory of evolution as a process of unfolding.