This site is to provide a permanent home for some of the late Cliff Lundberg's work on evolutionary theory. One of his longtime friends explains:
I first met Cliff at the Chess Pavilion in Golden Gate Park, just beyond the end of Haight Street. That was back in the middle sixties, when the Haight Ashbury was an exciting neighborhood to live in. Cliff was in his middle twenties, and I in my early thirties. We played chess quite often together, and afterwards we gravitated over to one of the local cafés, to drink coffee and talk philosophy.
Cliff had already developed the kernel of his ideas about vertebrate development, and spared no effort in explaining it to me. With the aid of restaurant napkins he managed to draw elaborate pictures of what he described as the progenitor of the class of vertebrates. I failed back then to summon up much enthusiasm for his theory. We were both somewhat anti-authoritarian back then, so finding fault with Darwinism seemed only par for the course.
It wasn't until quite recently, forty years after I had first met him, that I offered to assist him in rewriting his theme, and, in editing his thesis, realized the real meaning of his idea.
For me, it wasn't so much the conjectures about the vertebrate progenitor that mattered, although they were necessary in supporting his theory. It was the idea of the interpretation of the fossil record being made backwards, the idea of genetic "improvements" being the reshaping and loss of already existing parts, rather than the illogical budding of a new limb in an unlikely or preposterous place. The way genes work has never been at all clear to me, and Cliff's idea gave me an interesting insight into how they might work. I am not especially knowledgable about biology, but it is important to me when I encounter a new paradigm which gives me some insights and clues into how life might develop. Cliff's hypothesis is one of those. It is a pity that he is no longer around to promote his ideas, but this particular one might possibly outlive him. I hope so, because it is a challenging and provocative concept, and it deserves to be examined.
Cliff's main paper on "Segmentation and Vertebrate Origins" is available in both a web-friendly HTML version and a printer-friendly PDF version.