Anatomy is a visual science, even if the visual quality of anatomy can be declined in different ways, as we will show. Anatomy holds its own main feature in the etymology of the name itself: it is through cutting (ανά, anà) by lancet (τέμνω, tèmno) that preparations are yet prepared. This operation is aimed to make evident and well visible anatomical structures. Vesalius is the first modern anatomist and his main heuristic principle consists in the equivalence between seeing and knowing. The possibility of analyzing fresh anatomical preparations is made short by the unavoidable decomposition processes of the cadaver. Due to this reason beautiful and precious tables have always been drawn, painted and printed. We remember the ones by the Fisiocritic Paolo Mascagni, whose double centenary of death is celebrated this year. Watercolor tables are yet much realized and used. However they are bi-dimensional schematizations and, even if well done, they remain far from reality. Photography allows to fix the image of anatomical preparations with high fidelity of particulars. However these images are static. The graphic synthesis allows to realize four-dimensional human virtual models. They can be rotated according to the three spatial axes and, thanks to this, they can be observed from every point of view. Due to the fact that these are schematizations, they are very far from reality. For this reason CT three-dimensional reconstruction, that rebuilds anatomy in three dimensions, allows to obtain results with very superior quality and fidelity. However these reproductions lack color and real light. The gap between the iconographic representation and the existing thing is and will always be not fully eliminable. However our use of laser scanner technology allows to reduce this gap to minimal levels, with a quick and easy acquisition process. Laser scanner generates a cloud of points of the examined object. Each point is identified through exact coordinates. Besides, the photos of the same object can be over-placed to the cloud. The result is a virtual model that reconstructs the real object, highly corresponding as in morphology and as in colors. This virtual model allows us to interact and we can rotate it, watch at it from every perspective and especially we can measure it. The scanner we have used allowed us to reach an accuracy of ±25 μm. The anatomical preparation is literally “immortalized”, up to under-millimetric details, where the naked eye is ineffective. The so obtained image allows to re-observe and to measure the object forever. We can imagine a lot of very innovative, if not revolutionary applications. We realized our four-dimensional models aiming to attach them to this project. These scanning are of two skulls and of a heart. They are the concrete proof of the possibility of obtaining surprising results in many areas, from normal anatomy to pathological anatomy, from legal medicine to biology. This way of obtaining anatomical images is marking a turning point from a taxonomic, serial and verbal conception of Anatomy to a visual, spatial and mathematical one. Instead of lists of nominal labels we have now coordinates and quantitative/structural references. This makes Anatomy more treatable through digital methods. The visual approach has far origins: since XIII Century, when real (not formal) Renaissance of figurative arts begins, and during following ages, visual paradigms gain more and more importance in human knowledge. Once more we are dwarves on the shoulders of giants. Besides, detecting morphology by laser scanner pushes us to re-configure the relationship between nomothetic and ideographic approach in building scientific models.

6Contemporary science and culture show more and more extended and meaningful signs about the increasing explaining power of evolutionary paradigm. This power overcomes the field of the history of living species. We consider “On the Origin of Species” of 1859 by Charles Darwin as the establishment of this paradigm, but this original and fruitful idea has received the several and different contributions from near and (seemingly) far scientific fields. This process happened according distinguishable waves and leaded the evolutionary theory very far from its starting point, making it something wider and different. The current knowledge of this theory involves many kinds of scholars: biologists, zoologists, botanists, development biologists, genetics/genomics scholars and also scholars of many other disciplines, as statistics, mathematics, ecology, environmental sciences, physics, chemistry, linguistics, sociology, neuro-sciences, epidemiology, informatics, immunology. During the end of XX Century, the study of complexity, of self-organization and of emerging properties has been a decisive factor to extend evolution until beyond the boundaries of Biology. These phenomena, or properties, or features, that are shown by “living” and “not-living” systems (so called basing ourselves on traditional definitions), have deeply modified even the “properly” biologic evolution itself and besides this has demonstrated that, mutatis mutandis, evolutionary processes or phenomena happen also out of biologic dominion, referring “biologic” to “wet-ware world”. This is to say the class of evolutionary phenomena is more widely and more inclusively extended than our opinion. We can mean this as a revolution (according to Kuhn’s definition) that imposes us to restructure the definition of evolution itself and even to redraw the boundaries and the map of Biology itself. Aiming to establish a name of this field of study we propose “PanEvolutionary Theory” (PanEvo Theory). No doubt Prigogine offered an important contribution to this area. The thinking and the work of Enzo Tiezzi can be placed seen in the same perspective. Disregarding direct connections and contacts with the Nobel Prize Prigogine, however the studies of Enzo Tiezzi are neither a fully unexpected work nor a theory lacking of important potentialities: it is not a strange or eccentric academic exercise. Except the close contact and the dense exchanges with Prigogine, we collocate Enzo Tiezzi in the same context of Gregory Chaitin, of Rachel Carson, of John Harte and Robert H. Socolow, of James Paul Wesley, of Sertorio, of Oort and Peixoto, just to cite the most strictly related. Our Academy had the privilege and the honor of having Enzo Tiezzi in its ranks. We think that merits and developments of the thinking of this scholar have to produce important and lasting fruits in the future.

Our paper is focused on two fundamental points: the first one is a terminological proposal and the second one is a question. Obviously these two things are strictly related one another. The terminological proposal is aimed to name “vertebral shock absorber” the human rachis (globally considered, when it is in physiological conditions) in its most typical function: to sustain static/dynamic stresses, that moreover are directed according to its axial direction, obviously when this coincides with gravitational line. This aspects can be studied by modal analysis and by the model of Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues. According to our opinion, the mechanical feature must be considered as prevalent if compared with the structural one. Following it human rachis is usually named “column”. This mechanic sustain is distributed on three lines that are summarily parallel and are linked one another (by isthmuses and vertebral arches to build an horizontal ring) so they can be considered a unique compact viscous-elastic system. Each one of these three vertical sub-structure is built as a stacking of metameric elements (modules) along a continuous line.