At Futurism: “According to The Guardian, this single Posidonia australis plant, more commonly known as ribbon weed, spans an astonishing 77 square miles of undersea land off the coast of western Australia’s Shark Bay. For perspective, that’s three times the size of Manhattan. Move over, trees! There’s a new — well, ~4,500 year old — giant in town.”
Plants
New complexities discovered in how plants protect themselves against microorganisms
We keep discovering these novel mechanisms that all work together like an exquisitely designed system. And it is all supposed to have just happened by natural selection. Yet we never see that working in any situation where we try it.
Is Earth’s soil designed? Look what happened when we tried moon soil…
The authors are setting out to design a fertile lunar soil, but it would help them if they recognised that soils on Earth have the marks of design.
Did the dinosaurs’ departure change plants?
Researchers: Defensive features such as spines regressed and fruit sizes increased. The research has demonstrated this using palm trees as a model system…
Darwin wrote a book about orchids — and it was better received than Origin of Species
Shedinger: Unlike with the Origin, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Reviewers were extremely impressed with Darwin’s detailed documentation of the variety of contrivances in orchids. But much to Darwin’s dismay, they did not see this as evidence of natural selection.
A lost flower named “extinctus” has been rediscovered
Maybe they will have to change the name now. One term for this kind of life form is “Lazarus species.”
Richard Buggs’s talk on the abominable mystery of flowers now available
Intro: Charles Darwin was convinced that the evolution of complexity must proceed by tiny steps. Only tiny steps could be accumulated by natural selection. The process had to go slowly for it to work. Billions of years were needed. But Darwin was aware that this theory had a problem: flowers.
At Mind Matters News: How plants talk when we’re not around
Consciousness? Plant communications are extensive and perhaps much more complex than, say, computers, even though, as with computers, no one is likely “home.”
Evolutionary genomics with Richard Buggs: Why flowering plants are a mystery
Talk intro: Charles Darwin was convinced that the evolution of complexity must proceed by tiny steps. Only tiny steps could be accumulated by natural selection. The process had to go slowly for it to work. Billions of years were needed. But Darwin was aware that this theory had a problem: flowers.
Epigenetics and plant psychology: They show “scents of alarm” ;)
Researchers: Prior studies have shown that when grown near mint plants, soybean and field mustard (Brassica rapa) plants display heightened defense properties against herbivore pests by activating defense genes in their leaves, as a result of “eavesdropping” on mint volatiles. Put simply, if mint leaves get damaged after a herbivore attack, the plants in their immediate vicinity respond by activating their anti-herbivore defense systems in response to the chemical signals released by the damaged mint plant.
Researchers: Bacteria provided plants with genes to colonize land
Again, we ask, if so, in a world where horizontal gene transfer is this extensive and significant, what becomes of all the carefully structured Darwinian tales of the gradual development of selective advantage? Aren’t they just evolutionary fiction, a form of historical fiction?
At Evolution News: Abstract: Lönnig on Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery” (of flowers)
Lönnig: “the figure below shows that Darwin’s “abominable mystery” has become even more “abominable” and “mysterious” during the last 50 (not to speak of the last 150) years. “
Researchers: Unusual island life forms may have been genetically pre-coded to vary
“Choi et al., publishing in PNAS, have proposed a very un-Darwinian account of how “spectacular adaptive radiations” occur on oceanic islands such as Hawaii. This has been a “paradox of evolutionary biology,” they admit. Maybe the diversity is an outworking of “ancient polymorphisms” of ancestors with a rich gene pool.” As a hypothesis, it has everything going for it but Darwinism.
The Big Bang of flowers, 50–100 million years ago
Researchers: “It is not just that angiosperms are species-rich, but many individual angiosperm families show more morphological variety than all other seed plants combined, a distinction that reflects the dynamics of their genomes.” An episode we never heard before from the history of life. Is this the new Cambrian Explosion?
Another issue re the origin of plants between 3.4 and 2.9 billion years ago…
Timothy Standish: I couldn’t help but notice that the time photosynthesis is supposed to have evolved doesn’t line up with either the time when oxygen is supposed to have become an important element in the atmosphere, half a billion years later, or the time that fixed carbon begins showing up in the fossil record, which is much earlier, possibly over half a billion years.