This article, hopefully the first of many, is merely the viewpoint of an interested amateur onlooker. These notes represent my understanding of certain subjects regarding mesembs. They are not presented as fact but to generate comments and especiallycorrections from those with far more experience than myself. I quote a famous evolutionary biologist. "When I first wrote about the evolution of evolvability, I proposed a number of 'watershed events' in evolution, after which evolvability suddenly improved. The most promising example of a watershed event I could think of was segmentation. Segmentation, you remember, is the train-like modularisation of the body, in which parts and systems are repeated serially down the body. It seems to have been independently invented, in its full form in arthropods, vertebrates and annelid worms. (Richard Dawkins, 2004, pages 622/623).
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