My thanks to Professor Susan Stepney (York University)
https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/people/susan
Professor Susan Stepney, with whom I have discussed related ideas over several years, after hearing one of my talks early in 2022, presented without a diagram representing the main ideas, sent me a pencil drawing attempting to summarise the ideas in a 2-D array of evolutionary and developmental changes, with evolutionary changes shown horizontally from left to right and developmental changes shown vertically from top to bottom.
Susan's original hand-drawn diagram was this:
She claimed that her diagram had helped her to understand the claims I was making! Until then I had not tried to use a diagram to present the ideas, but I liked her suggestion.
The diagram below, was my attempt to make use of the ideas in her diagram. It was used in several presentations from June 2022. Over several months, across several presentations, I made attempts to improve the theory and the diagrams, by adding more detail and attempting (and perhaps failing?) to make an increasingly complex collection of ideas easier to understand.
The latest version of my presentation of those ideas is now
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/evo-devo.html
It uses a variant of Susan's diagrams with the roles of vertical and horizontal swapped: i.e. evolutionary time is now on the vertical axis and development on the horizontal axis.
Because that document grew too long and too complex I moved the information
about the earlier diagrams to a separate web page, namely THIS one, located at:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/evo-devo-stepney.html
which is referenced in the new document, but no longer a part of it.
Here is my attempt to produce a useful diagram, based on Susan's ideas. This was used in several talks during 2022.
For use in presentations I later replaced this diagram with a more complex
version, with more text, now used in the main presentation:
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/evo-devo.html#evo-devo-new
Later the orientations of development and evolution were swapped in the figures in the main presentation
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/evo-devo.html#fig-Evo-Devo-b
NOTE
Comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome, including comments pointing
out that I am seriously mistaken!
(Email a dot sloman at bham.ac.uk)
This work, and everything else on my website, unless explicitly excluded, is
licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
If you use or comment on my ideas please include a URL if possible, so
that readers can see the latest version.
Maintained by Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham