Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis (ECT) is most often applied to multicellular animals and the complexity of their macroscopic environments to explain how cognition evolved. We think that the ECT may be less suited to explain the origins of the animal bodily organization, including this organization’s potentiality for dealing with complex macroscopic environments. We argue that acquiring the fundamental sensorimotor features of the animal body may be better explained as a consequence of dealing with internal bodily—rather than environmental complexity. To press and elucidate this option, we develop the notion of an animal sensorimotor organization (ASMO) that derives from an internal coordination account for the evolution of early nervous systems. The ASMO notion is a reply to the question how a collection of single cells can become integrated such that the resulting multicellular organization becomes sensitive to and can manipulate macroscopic features of both the animal body and its environment. In this account, epithelial contractile tissues play the central role in the organization behind complex animal bodies. In this paper, we relate the ASMO concept to recent work on epithelia, which provides empirical evidence that supports central assumptions behind the ASMO notion. Second, we discuss to what extent the notion applies to basic animal architectures, exemplified by sponges and jellyfish. We conclude that the features exhibited by the ASMO are plausibly explained by internal constraints acting on and within this multicellular organization, providing a challenge for the role the ECT plays in this context.

中文翻译：

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动物感觉运动组织：环境复杂性论文的挑战

Godfrey-Smith 的环境复杂性论文 (ECT) 最常应用于多细胞动物及其宏观环境的复杂性，以解释认知是如何进化的。我们认为 ECT 可能不太适合解释动物身体组织的起源，包括该组织处理复杂宏观环境的潜力。我们认为，获得动物身体的基本感觉运动特征可以更好地解释为处理内部身体而不是环境复杂性的结果。为了强调和阐明这个选项，我们提出了动物感觉运动组织 (ASMO) 的概念，该概念源自早期神经系统进化的内部协调解释。ASMO 概念是对单个细胞的集合如何整合在一起，从而使由此产生的多细胞组织变得对动物体及其环境的宏观特征敏感并可以操纵的问题的回答。在这种情况下，上皮收缩组织在复杂动物体背后的组织中起着核心作用。在本文中，我们将 ASMO 概念与最近关于上皮的工作联系起来，这提供了支持 ASMO 概念背后核心假设的经验证据。其次，我们讨论这个概念在多大程度上适用于基本的动物结构，例如海绵和水母。我们得出的结论是，ASMO 表现出的特征可以通过作用于该多细胞组织上和内部的内部约束来合理地解释，