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. “
Plants
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.
Researchers say they have a “precise estimate” for the time of origin of photosynthesis
Botanist Margaret Helder writes to comment “The point to reflect on is what all those heterotrophs did for food prior to the appearance of the autotrophs. Any organic molecules in the environment would be quickly digested if there were only organisms around with no capacity to reduce carbon.”
Stanford: Plants evolved complexity in two rapid bursts — 250 million years apart
Researcher: “The most surprising thing is this kind of stasis, this plateau in complexity after the initial evolution of seeds and then the total change that happened when flowering plants started diversifying,” said lead study author Andrew Leslie, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “The reproductive structures look different in all these plants, but they all have about the same number of parts during that stasis.”
Plant roots from 400 million years ago used a method that is now extinct
If Asteroxylon’s system is extinct, there was less time for the current systems to develop.
Fossil spores on land pushed back 20 million years
The big story here isn’t about the disconnect between molecular and fossil data; it’s about how early on more complex life forms got started (all that complexity in such a short time isn’t looking good for random mutations).
The textbooks are wrong: Birds CAN smell
At Science: “Other bird species may also respond to “calls” from injured plants, recent evidence shows. Two European birds, the great tit and the blue tit, locate insects that are attacking pine trees by detecting the volatile chemicals the stressed trees release … “
Yes, plants remember things – they seem more like animals the more we learn
People are becoming, more and more obviously outliers all the time. The pop science prediction had been “less and less.”
Plant communications raise the question of intelligence in nature
It’s getting harder to avoid talking about the intelligence in nature and still make sense.
Seeds like airplanes
Alsomitra vine seeds use paper-thin wings to disperse like giant gliders.
If photosynthesis could really be as old as life itself…
Well, that’s good news for the hope of finding life on other planets! But researchers hoping to rush in and save Darwinism should know that if the earliest organisms could photosynthesize, an intelligent origin of life is virtually certain.
Italian ID group interviews Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig (in English)
“Secretary and professional journalist Marco Respinti interviews well known Dr. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, retired head researcher at Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research on a fascinating journey through genetics of plants, cybernetics, “sacred cows” and Intelligent Design.”
Horizontal gene transfer between plants and insects acknowledged
So what becomes of all the Darwinian casuistry around “fitness” and “costly fitness” if things can happen so simply as this? The article emphasizes the benefits of studying “evolution.” Indeed, but that can’t mean fronting Darwinism 101 any more.