Problems of Motor Coordination and their Evolutionary Origins

        Animals are constantly moving. Insects crawl, fish swim, frogs hop, penguins waddle, horses trot and gallop, while humans walk, reach, grasp, jump and much, much more. Clearly, there are many ways to coordinate the muscles, joints, ligaments, tendons, and bones that make up the skeletal-articular-muscular movement apparatus (i.e., our bodies). While the question of how we coordinate movement may seem like an intuitive and trivial problem to solve, the scientist faces many challenges in finding a satisfactory answer. This begs the question: what makes motor coordination so challenging? At the same time, we can see clear differences in the demands placed on coordination by different animals, not least because of their different bodily structures. No doubt coordinating movement has become much harder since the beginning of life. For example, single-celled organisms definitely do not face the same level of difficulty coordinating movement as humans or dogs do. In this blog, I draw heavily on Essays 2 and 3 of Nikolai Bernstein's On Dexterity and Its Development (Bernstein, 1996) to outline the challenges of motor coordination and to identify their evolutionary origins. While the essays tackle these issues separately, I aim to provide a coherent synthesis of Bernstein's insights by drawing direct links between each coordination challenge and a specific evolutionary event. Of course, this is not to say that the problems of coordination are caused by single evolutionary events. Rather, they are highlighted merely as notable events among the many which have led to such difficulties in controlling movement.