Abstract
In his influential book, The Antecedents of Man, Le Gros Clark (1962) maintained that the order Primates cannot be defined by specific attributes that uniquely distinguish its members from the members of other orders but rather can only be characterized by evolutionary trends such as the progressive expansion of the brain. Recent neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data suggest that at least one unique defining feature for the order Primates does exist. In all mammals the retina projects to the optic tectum, but the manner in which the visual field is represented in the optic tectum of Primates differs from that found in all other mammals. In Primates the optic tectum on each side of the brain contains a systematic representation of the contralateral half of the visual field, whereas in other mammals the optic tectum of each side contains a systematic representation of the visual field that is viewed by the contralateral retina, which is the primitive vertebrate condition found in all non-mammalian vertebrates (see Fig. 1). The drawback in using such neurophysiological criteria in taxonomic definitions is that it is not possible to survey a very large number of species for a particular attribute, and the method cannot be applied to fossils.
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Allman, J. (1982). Reconstructing the Evolution of the Brain in Primates Through the Use of Comparative Neurophysiological and Neuroanatomical Data. In: Armstrong, E., Falk, D. (eds) Primate Brain Evolution. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4148-2_2
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