William H. Calvin is an American theoretical neurophysiologist and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is known for popularizing neuroscience and evolutionary biology, including the hybrid of those two fields, neural Darwinism. He relates abrupt climate change to human evolution and more recently has been working on global climate change issues.
Calvin in 2008
Neural Darwinism is a biological, and more specifically Darwinian and selectionist, approach to understanding global brain function, originally proposed by American biologist, researcher and Nobel-Prize recipient Gerald Maurice Edelman. Edelman's 1987 book Neural Darwinism introduced the public to the theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS) – which is the core theory underlying Edelman's explanation of global brain function.
Edelman giving a lecture, September 30, 2010
Mesenchymal-epithelial transitions – epithelia to mesenchyme (EMT) and mesenchyme to epithelia (MET) transitions utilizing CAMs and SAMs to form epethelia; and, growth factors and inducers to mediate the transition to mesenchyme as the CAMs and SAMs are withdrawn or localized on the cell membrane.