To Explain the Origin of Animal Body Plans, Here's What May Be the Most Inadequate Proposal Yet

We've seen some pretty dead-on-arrival explanations for the origin of new body plans in the Cambrian explosion, but this one takes the cake. Researchers at CNRS in France (Centre national de la recherché scientifique) have been experimenting with rubber sheets to explain how the first bilateral body plans might have evolved:

A simple physical mechanism that can be assimilated to folding, or buckling, means that an unformed mass of cells can change in a single step into an embryo organized as...