I was an invertebrate palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, trained at the University of Bonn, Germany, and now based in Cyprus. My central preoccupation was the origin and early evolution of animals (particularly arthropods) during the Cambrian, though my interests sprawled across the biological spectrum in ways that proved both intellectually rewarding and professionally inconvenient.
I am no longer an academic since palaeontology doesn’t pay the bills. I now work in film production as a CTO and motion control operator at ABL Films, operating high-speed robots, high-speed cameras, and developing new post-production pipelines. Nonetheless, the academic bug never really leaves, and | still unhealthily keep up with all my old fields.
This website is an archive.
It exists to preserve what I learned and taught during my years in academia, and to make that knowledge available to anyone who might find it useful. We live in an era where primary knowledge is being rapidly obscured by AI slop, and I do not intend to contribute to that erosion of fundamental knowledge. Everything here represents genuine expertise from years of reading, fieldwork, failure, and argument.
Scientific Worldview
Contrary to the gene-centred view of evolution that dominated anglophone biology from the 1940s onward, the palaeobiological tradition I have always been most attracted to kept morphology and the study of body plans central, and treated the patterns visible in the fossil record as phenomena requiring explanation in their own right rather than as noise to be explained away.
The core of my position is this: you cannot explain the origin of animal body plans by scaling up from population genetics. The gulf between microevolution and macroevolution is not bridged by accumulation; it requires understanding how development actually works, how embryonic processes channel what forms are possible, and how higher-level evolutionary phenomena (species sorting, clade-level trends, the differential success of entire lineages) operate according to their own rules. We cannot simply extrapolate from microevolutionary processes to explain all of biology.
I take macroevolution seriously as a level of explanation. The patterns palaeontologists observe (stasis, punctuated change, mass extinctions that reset ecological dominance, the explosive origination of body plans followed by long periods of taxonomic reshuffling within established designs) are not illusions created by an incomplete fossil record. They are real phenomena that demand causal accounts beyond “selection on individuals, summed over time.”
I reject gene-level selection as an explanatory framework. Genes do not “see” fitness; organisms do, and organisms are integrated systems whose parts cannot be optimised independently. The “gene’s eye view” mistakes bookkeeping for causation: genes’ effects are always mediated through organisms, populations, and ecological contexts. On levels of selection more broadly, I lean toward accepting group selection as a real (if often weak) force, and I think hierarchical selection theory (selection operating simultaneously at genes, organisms, groups, species, and clades) provides a more coherent picture of how evolution actually proceeds than any single-level account.
This is where evo-devo enters. The study of how development itself evolves provides the causal machinery that population genetics lacks. Understanding the gene regulatory networks that underlie body plan specification, the modularity of developmental programmes, and the deep conservation of toolkit genes explains both why certain transformations are possible and why others are forbidden. The reason body plans originate rapidly and then remain stable is that the developmental systems underlying those body plans become increasingly integrated, increasingly entrenched, and increasingly canalised into particular morphogenetic trajectories. Morphogenesis is not infinitely plastic, developmental programmes channel it into certain forms and away from others. This is why convergence is so common and why certain morphologies appear repeatedly across independent lineages while others never arise at all.
The relationship between genotype and phenotype is not a simple mapping, and similar developmental genes can be co-opted independently for analogous functions. The toolkit is conserved, but what organisms build with it is not.
I am sceptical of molecular clocks, which too often assume constant rates of substitution across lineages and calibrate themselves against the same fossil record they then claim to supersede. Morphological data in phylogenetics has been unfairly marginalised by the molecular revolution. Molecules and morphology answer different questions, and for understanding the evolution of form (which is, after all, what palaeontologists care about), morphological characters remain indispensable. When molecular and morphological phylogenies conflict, the appropriate response is not to assume molecules are correct by default, but to investigate what biological processes might cause the discordance.
None of these positions are eccentric. They represent a broad current in contemporary evolutionary biology, sometimes called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, that takes seriously the limitations of the Modern Synthesis consensus. The questions palaeontologists ask require palaeontological answers, and reducing everything to genetics loses more than it gains.
Research Interests
My taxon of choice has always been the arthropods. My BSc thesis involved the redescription and phylogenetic analysis of two exceptionally preserved stem-group arthropods from the Devonian Hunsrück Slates of Germany. My goal, like every other worker in early arthropod phylogenetics, was to convince everyone that my hypothesis for arthropod systematics was most reflective of reality. Unfortunately, every other worker in this field has the same goal, and each one has a different hypothesis.
I never wanted to shoehorn myself into a narrow field. My range of interests varied across the biological spectrum, though arthropods remained the gravitational centre. Some disciplinary biases: I dealt only with invertebrates and broadly with plants. Bacteria and other microbes entered the picture solely as symbionts or geochemical agents. Vertebrates are boring and useless, and I considered them only when they were hosts destined to die.
A list of rabbit holes I went into over the years:
Animal Phylogeny. I concentrated on arthropods (both their position on the metazoan tree and their internal interrelationships), but maintained interest in more basal groups (sponges, cnidarians, and the various wormy taxa). Molluscan phylogeny was a hobby, though not as deeply pursued as with arthropods.
The Fossil Record. The insect and early arthropod fossil records and what they tell us about the evolution of these taxa; completeness of the fossil record; taphonomy; geochemistry of exceptional preservation.
Phylogenetic Methodology. The mathematical bases and statistics of tree-building, but especially the roles of morphology versus molecular data (I fall squarely within the morphology camp). I am a harsh critic of molecular clocks, where “critic” means someone who makes criticisms when they are due.
Developmental Biology. Comparative embryology (arthropods); evo-devo; deep homology; morphogenesis and canalisation.
Evolutionary Theory. Levels of selection; the role of fossils and palaeontology in identifying and elucidating evolutionary processes.
History of Biology. Everything, from how much ancient cultures knew, through medieval and Renaissance periods, through the Enlightenment and the origins of modern biological disciplines, to the emergence of present-day debates. Also, philosophy of biology (species concepts!) and biographical histories of scientists.
Personal
I have collected rocks from the summits of the Alps, fossils from the humid depths of India, and insects from the montane forests of northern Japan. I have touched specimens unseen for decades, coughed from dust settled on books neglected for centuries, and brought organisms that had been laying dormant for a thousand years back to life.
My greatest pride from my scientific years is my personal research database: over 200,000 PDFs and growing. Fully curated and searchable, it was intended to be my contribution to the world’s rebirth after an apocalyptic destruction of modern civilisation, should such an event occur. For now, it remains a personal Library of Alexandria, and its contents inform what I share on this site.
Teaching and Outreach
Although research was what I preferred doing, teaching was always a large part of my activities. I worked as a TA and lecturer, and also gave many public lectures. I worked with schools to provide extracurricular field trips and lessons to teach children and teenagers about the natural world around them.
This website itself continues that impulse, and its first iteration in the early 2010s (“Bioteaching.com”) was a repository for my students at the time to get more reading material. The lectures, notes, and writings archived here are offered freely to anyone who wants to learn from them, in the hope that this material has some value.