Category: Plants
Algae have genes otherwise known only in land plants
| August 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
Plants are thought to have started moving to land 500 million years ago. The algae are presumed to have been carrying the redundant genes since then. So did they then pre-exist the move to land? From ScienceDaily: 500 million years ago, the first plants living in water took to land. The genetic adaptations associated with […]
Osaka Group structuralist, 97, publishes new book
| July 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
With an interesting chapter on carnivorous plants. At Oscillations, Suzan Mazur takes note of the new book by structuralist Antonio Lima de Faria, now an emeritus professor at Lund University, whom she describes as “one of the Osaka Group of ‘structuralists,’ whose other members included Brian Goodwin, Mae-Wan Ho, Peter Saunders et al.” The main theme of Periodic Tables Unifying Living Organisms at […]
Conundrum: How do self-infertile plants pass on the trait through random processes
| July 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Plants |
From at ScienceDaily: Self-fertilization is a problem, as it leads to inbreeding. Recognition systems that prevent self-fertilization have evolved to ensure that a plant mates only with a genetically different plant and not with itself. The recognition systems underlying self-incompatibility are found all around us in nature, and can be found in at least 100 […]
Do host plants tell insects whether to stay or leave?
| July 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Scientists at Washington State University and China Jiliang University have discovered that the quality of the host rice plant determines whether the brown planthopper, a major pest on rice in Asia, grows short wings or long wings. Wing size determines whether the insect can fly long distances to other plants or stick around […]
Are trees the ultimate in compressed information?
| July 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From Gerd Bossinger and Antanas Spokevicius at Phys.org: From ancient European beech trees to gigantic Californian redwoods and Australian mountain ashes, new research has found the enormous trunks of these trees are all formed from a single layer of cells no wider than the tip of a needle. … Wood is one of the world’s […]
Will a new type of photosynthesis, just discovered, change the hunt for alien life?
| June 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From Haley Dunning at Imperial College of London: The vast majority of life on Earth uses visible red light in the process of photosynthesis, but the new type uses near-infrared light instead. It was detected in a wide range of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) when they grow in near-infrared light, found in shaded conditions like bacterial […]
Researchers clearly observe quantum effects in photosynthesis
| May 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Physics, Plants |
From Bill Andrews at Discover: In particular, according to a study released Monday in Nature Chemistry, an international team of scientists showed that molecules involved in photosynthesis display quantum mechanical behavior. Even though we’d suspected as much before, this is the first time we’ve seen quantum effects in living systems. … With a technique called […]
Phylogenetics of plants is a mess
| May 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Genomics, Intelligent Design, Plants, Tree of life |
From Douglas E. Soltis, Michael J. Moore, Emily B. Sessa, Stephen A. Smith, and Pamela S. Soltis, Using and navigating the plant tree of life, at Amerian Journal of Botany 7 April 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.1071 (open access) : The “tree of life” has become a metaphor for the interconnectivity and breadth of all life on Earth. […]
Researcher: Mathematics sheds light on “unfathomably complex” cellular thinking
| May 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Queensland University of Technology (QUT) researcher Dr Robyn Araujo has developed new mathematics to solve a longstanding mystery of how the incredibly complex biological networks within cells can adapt and reset themselves after exposure to a new stimulus. … “Proteins form unfathomably complex networks of chemical reactions that allow cells to communicate and […]
Did sweet potatoes cross the Pacific without humans 100 kya?
| April 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From Dan Garisto at Science News: New genetic evidence instead suggests that wild precursors to sweet potatoes reached Polynesia at least 100,000 years ago — long before humans inhabited the South Pacific islands, researchers report April 12 in Current Biology. If true, it could also challenge the idea that Polynesian seafarers reached the Americas around […]
Researcher: Best educated guesses fail with plant evolution
| March 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From at ScienceDaily: Ancient microbes may have been producing oxygen through photosynthesis a billion years earlier than we thought, which means oxygen was available for living organisms very close to the origin of life on earth. In a new article in Heliyon, a researcher from Imperial College London studied the molecular machines responsible for photosynthesis […]
Researchers: Plants colonized Earth 100 mya earlier than thought
| February 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Plants, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: For the first four billion years of Earth’s history, our planet’s continents would have been devoid of all life except microbes. All of this changed with the origin of land plants from their pond scum relatives, greening the continents and creating habitats that animals would later invade. The timing of this episode has […]
Researchers: Over one hundred million-year gap between accounts of when flowers originated – “false precision”
| February 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
When it’s this imprecise, is it still science? From ScienceDaily: Flowering plants likely originated between 149 and 256 million years ago according to new UCL-led research. The study, published today in New Phytologist by researchers from the UK and China, shows that flowering plants are neither as old as suggested by previous molecular studies, nor […]
Researchers: Cross-species gene regulation observed for the first time
| January 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Dodder, a parasitic plant that causes major damage to crops in the US and worldwide every year, can silence the expression of genes in the host plants from which it obtains water and nutrients. This cross-species gene regulation, which includes genes that contribute to the host plant’s defense against parasites, has never before […]
New hypothesis as to why flowering plants predominate
| January 15, 2018 | Posted by News under 'Junk DNA', Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Scientists have found an explanation for how flowering plants became dominant so rapidly in ecosystems across the world — a problem that Charles Darwin called an ‘abominable mystery’. In a study publishing on January 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, Kevin Simonin and Adam Roddy, from San Francisco State University and […]
Researchers: Plants can choose how to respond to competitors. Do they think?
| December 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind, Minds, Naturalism, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Biologists from the University of Tübingen have demonstrated that plants can choose between alternative competitive responses according to the stature and densities of their opponents. A new study by researchers from the Institute of Evolution and Ecology reveals that plants can evaluate the competitive ability of their neighbors and optimally match their responses […]
Plant studies: Intelligence does not require a brain or nervous system
| December 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Information, Intelligent Design, Mind, Minds, Plants |
From philosopher Laura Ruggles at Aeon: What does it even mean to say that a mallow can learn and remember the location of the sunrise? The idea that plants can behave intelligently, let alone learn or form memories, was a fringe notion until quite recently. Memories are thought to be so fundamentally cognitive that some […]
Agriculture: Article presents results of conscious human selection as if humans are an unconscious natural force
| November 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Professor Robin Allaby, in Warwick’s School of Life Sciences, has discovered that human crop gathering was so extensive, as long ago as the last Ice Age, that it started to have an effect on the evolution of rice, wheat and barley — triggering the process which turned these plants from wild to domesticated. […]
Plant biologist offers evidence to falsify Darwinism – the backstory
| October 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From Granville Sewell at Evolution News & Views: Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, who studied mutations for 25 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Köln, Germany, is now retired but still writes often on the topic of Darwinism and intelligent design. He is one of those old-school scientists who […]
From The Scientist: How first and “very, very complex” trees got to be so big 420 million to 359 mya
| October 26, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From Shawna Williams at The Scientist: Ancient fossils reveal how woodless trees got so big: by continuously ripping apart their xylem and knitting it back together. The trees’ woody fibers—namely, xylem, which carries water up the trunk—formed rings in the outer part of the trunk and connected to one another by horizontal strands, says Berry. […]
