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How the very first nervous systems evolved remains a fundamental openquestion. Molecular and genomic techniques have revolutionized our knowledge ofthe molecular ingredients behind this transition but not yet provided a clearpicture of the morphological and tissue changes involved. Here we focus on abehavioural perspective that centres on movement by muscle contraction.Building on the finding that molecules for chemical neural signalling predatemulticellular animals, we investigate a gradual evolutionary scenario fornervous systems that consists of two stages: A) Chemically transmission ofelectrical activity between adjacent cells provided a primitive form of musclecoordination in a contractile epithelial tissue. B) This primitive form ofcoordination was subsequently improved upon by evolving the axodendriticprocesses of modern neurons. We use computer simulations to investigate thefirst stage. The simulations show that chemical transmission across acontractile sheet can indeed produce useful body scale patterns, but only forsmall-sized animals. For larger animals the noise in chemical neural signallinginterferes. Our results imply that a two-stage scenario is a viable approach tonervous system evolution. The first stage could provide an initial behaviouraladvantage, as well as a clear scaffold for subsequent improvements inbehavioural coordination.

A Behavioural Perspective on the Early Evolution of Nervous Systems: A Computational Model of Excitable Myoepithelia