Evolution: the angiosperm gap (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, October 27, 2023, 19:30 (392 days ago) @ David Turell

A new essay on the mystery:

https://twitter.com/RJABuggs/status/1699369829424054284?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5E...

"This @NaturePlants n paper deserves to be widely known, but is not an easy read. Here is my lay interpretation of the abstract:

"There are several major types of plants, with different body plans. Some are single celled, others are much more complex. We don’t know how this diversity evolved. Here we use a big dataset to provide new evidence that the different types are very different (even when fossils are included). This is especially true of the structures that they use to reproduce. Assuming that the types evolved from each other, we build a model that shows that intermediates forms once existed; these must have disappeared without trace and we can't be specific about what they were. The major plant types have evolved in unique ways. Types with simple body plans can have lots of diversity in them, so it is not necessary to be complex to be diverse. More complex types tend to have larger gene families within them, so genome duplications are important for plant evolution. The different types of plants don’t appear all at once: each one appears suddenly and in diversity at a different time point (we also completely disprove the idea that the major types all appeared at once). The pattern we find in plants is a similar pattern to that shown by the major types of animals and fungi." (my bold)

Comment: another major gap. Note my bold. The Darwinian plea is there must be intermediates. Tell that to those who cry about the Cambrian gap. How about God, the designer who creates gaps?