Mostly data driven.
Basically the same as clade.
When a characteristic is basal, it basically means the opposite of it being polyphyletic.
E.g. monotremes laying eggs did not evolve separately after function loss, it comes directly from reptiles.
Kind of the opposite of a basal group.
A Drosophila melanogaster has about 135k neurons, and we only managed to reconstruct its connectome in 2023.
The human brain has 86 billion neurons, about 1 million times more. Therefore, it is obvious that we are very very far away from a full connectome.
Instead however, we could look at larger scales of connectome, and then try from that to extract modules, and then reverse engineer things module by module.
This is likely how we are going to "understand how the human brain works".
Some notable connectomes:
- 2019: 1mm cube of mouse brain: www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02208-0
- 2023: Drosophila connectome
Basically mean that parallel evolution happened. Some cool ones:
- homeothermy: mammals and birds
- animal flight: bats, birds and insects
- multicellularity: evolved a bunch of times
- eol.org/ Encyclopedia of Life
Naming taxonomic ranks like genus, domain, etc. is a fucking waste of time, only useful before we developed molecular biology.
All that matters is the tree of clades with examples of species in each clade, and common characteristics shared by the clade.
And with molecular biology, we can build those trees incredibly well for extant species. When extinct species are involved however, things get more complicated.
There's about 60 of them.
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - Internal cross file references done right:
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
Figure 6. Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents.Live URL: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordateDescendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact