In evolutionary terms, imagery developed hundreds of millions of years before symbolic or language-like systems of cognition.
The Center's website reveals that visitors to the exhibition will encounter "early hand-drawn works, large computer generated Cibachrome prints, video art and his most recent interactive projected imagery that explores and embodies evolutionary processes, physical and virtual space".
Brian Collier, an artist in Kansas City, Mo., drew on data and imagery provided by Chris Ray, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, and by Shana Weber, the sustainability manager at Princeton, for his work "Pika Alarm".
"Homo sapiens developed rounder skulls and grew bigger parietal cortexes — the region of the brain that integrates visual imagery and motor coordination — because of an evolutionary arms race with increasingly wary prey".
It can therefore safely be argued that Darwin's hypothetical evolutionary branching diagram, as an icon, did not introduce any new type of imagery.
However, the stage-like evolutionary relationships inherent in Haeckel's phylogeny, coupled with older religious connotations of TOL imagery, appear to have inhibited the scientific uptake of his universal tree [ 6- 8].
He had become enamored with Sewall Wright's (e.g., 1931, 1932) imagery of the "adaptive landscape," using it to frame his discussion of various evolutionary issues.
Additionally, because most tools retain tree-based imagery, they may retain design elements that foster existing student misconceptions about the evolutionary process (e.g., Matuk 2008).
Simpson constructed his theory of quantum evolution around geneticist Sewall Wright's (1932) "adaptive landscape" imagery (see Eldredge 2008b, for a discussion of adaptive landscapes and their use in evolutionary theory; Simpson 1944, sometimes shifted to his own terminology, talking about interzonal shifts on an "adaptive grid," but the essence of the imagery is the same as Wright's).
In Wright's adaptive landscape imagery (as used by Wright himself, as well as by Dobzhansky and probably every other evolutionary biologist who has used the metaphor), selection will keep a population (or an entire species, etc).
