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Abstract

Abstract. The musculo-skeletal system serves the mechanical function of creating motion and transmitting loads. It is made up mainly of four components: bone, cartilage, muscle and fibrous connective tissue. These have evolved over millions of years into the complex and diverse shapes of the animal skeleton. The skeleton, however, is not built to a static plan: it can adapt to mechanical forces during growth, it can remodel if the forces change, and it can regenerate if it is damaged. In this paper, the regulation of skeletal construction by mechanical forces is analyzed from both ontogenetic and phylogenetic standpoints. In the first part, models of biomechanical processes that act during skeletal ontogenesis -tissue differentiation and bone remodeling -are presented and, in the second, the evolution of the middle ear is used as an example of biomechanical change in skeletal phylogenesis. Because the constitutive laws for skeletal tissues are relatively well understood, and because the skeleton is preserved in the fossil record, application of mechanics to skeletal evolution seems to present a good opportunity to explore the relationships governing ontogenetic adaptations and phylogenetic change.

Biomechanics in AIMETA

“…Tissues have evolved over millions of years into complex and diverse shapes under the forces of natural selection. Evolution has also provided tissues with the capability to adapt to their specific environments during growth and to remodel and regenerate if they are damaged [20,71].…”

Rehearing Lost Time: Proust and Mahler

“…We might well say of a Mahler symphony what Christopher Prendergast says of the Proustian novel, that not only does it 'look back as it thrusts forward, it also moves sideways, in a complex set of lateral shifts and swerves, deploying a technique of digression so systematic as to empty the notion of "digression" of its normal meaning'. 12 Specifically, the intrusion of the past into the present shapes Mahler's music from his earliest works onwards, with powerful structural and dramatic consequences. Das klagende Lied, a three-movement dramatic cantata completed in 1880 when Mahler was just twenty years of age, thematizes this idea.…”