Tales from the Tree Bundle of Seedlings, or maybe best called Web of Life: Traditionally, marine microplankton had been divided similarly to species on land. You had plant-like phytoplankton, such as algae, and animal-like zooplankton that ate the phytoplankton. What Stoecker found was that some of these organisms were somewhere in the middle: They could […]
Plants
Plants can both “smell” and “hear”
The team did a great piece of work on plant hearing. But so much language around “evolution” is just clutter, creating the impression that we know things we really don’t. And sometimes that gets in the way of understanding what we see now in real time.
How Darwinism misled biologists about lichens
They spent a lot of time ridiculing what they should have been studying. They ridiculed the now commonly accepted idea that a lichen was algae and fungi living as if they were one organism: The very notion of different organisms living so closely with—or within—each other was unheard of. That they should coexist to their […]
How plant roots know when to branch out
We keep discovering more information systems in plants and the amount of time for them to develop has been growing shorter. As the Darwinist becomes more urgent, his explanations grow less likely.
Key plant groups pushed back tens of millions of years
The report backdates the origin, not only of podocarps (the evergreens), but of seed ferns and cycad types of plants. Those are millions of years of natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism) that these plants did not turn out to have. If Darwinism seemed unbelievable before, what do you think now?
Is salad murder?
If we think plants are “equal organisms” with respect to humans, it’s not clear whether salad is or isn’t murder. Or whether murder is even a serious ethical problem. One may have the right precepts but defending them is awkward.
Researchers: Flowers bloomed in early Jurassic, 50 million years earlier than thought
“Researchers were not certain where and how flowers came into existence because it seems that many flowers just popped up in the Cretaceous from nowhere,” explains lead author Qiang Fu” It now looks as though they just popped into the Jurassic from nowhere.
A complex network of genes helps plants cope with DNA damage
From ScienceDaily: When a building is damaged, a general contractor often oversees various subcontractors — framers, electricians, plumbers and drywall hangers — to ensure repairs are done in the correct order and on time. Similarly, when DNA is damaged, a molecular general contractor oversees a network of genetic subcontractors to ensure that the diverse cellular […]
Did a researcher create a cyborg plant?
Is the following really a plant-machine hybrid?: If plants could move around freely, they would move into the most beneficial lighting arrangement. They compensate for their rootedness by growing in the optimum direction and constantly repositioning their leaves. An MIT researcher has helped out a plant by fitting it with electronic sensors attached to robotic […]
Darwinism impedes understanding of plant communications
Plants couldn’t do anything that can’t be explained by the selfish gene, you see: The sheer complexity of the communications systems plants demonstrate astonishes us to the point that scientists have refused to believe the evidence. In 1983, plant scientists Jack Schultz and Ian Baldwin reported that maple saplings that were exposed to maples damaged […]
Is Darwin’s “abominable mystery” of flowers partly solved by a recent discovery?
The beautifully-preserved fossil found in amber from 99 million years ago belongs to the large, diverse Pentepetalae clade: Together with contemporaneous flowers and fruits, the researchers say, Lijinganthus indicates that core eudicots flourished on Earth about 100 million years ago, although did not dominate vegetation until about 20 million years later, the mid-Cretaceous. “Various molecular […]
Plants have developed complex strategies to get ants to help them
From ScienceDaily: A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences breaks down the genetic history of 1,700 species of ants and 10,000 plant genera, and the researchers found that the long history of ant and plant co-evolution started with ants foraging on plants and plants later responding by evolving ant-friendly traits. […]
Dandelion flight is unique, “impossible”
They don’t usually write this way at Nature: Dandelion seeds fly using a method that researchers thought couldn’t work in the real world, according to a study1 published on 17 October in Nature. When some animals, aeroplanes or seeds fly, rings of circulating air called vortices form in contact with their wings or wing-like surfaces. […]
“Severe” manipulation of figures from lab that studied gene silencing technique
But the reason for the manipulation is unclear: A fresh investigation into publications from a French plant-biology laboratory has revealed “severe” and “intentional” manipulation of research figures. No one has yet been named as responsible for the misconduct, but the institute that led the investigation is expected to announce disciplinary measures by the end of September. […]
Plants as “revolutionary geniuses”?
We’ve been talking about intelligence in termite mounds. Not “of” termite mounds but “in” them. From a review of The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior, by plant biologist Stefan Mancuso, To overcome the human bias toward brain-centered intelligence, Mancuso writes, one must consider that, unlike animals, plants can’t move. […]