Evolution: Darwin's abominable mystery again (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 14, 2024, 16:53 (161 days ago) @ David Turell

Angiosperm sudden appearance is even more sudden:

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/06/fossil-friday-darwins-abominable-mystery-corroborated...

"...I reported about the “abominable mystery” of the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the Early Cretaceous period, which bothered Charles Darwin himself as a big problem for his theory. Last year, I discussed (Bechly 2023) a new study, which confirmed this discontinuity in the history of plants as “surely the greatest conundrum in the whole of paleontology” according to the lead author of this study, distinguished paleontologist Philip Donoghue.

"Now, another new seminal study by Zuntini et al. (2024), published on April 24 by 278 (!) co-authors in the prestigious journal Nature, provided further strong corroboration of the “abominable mystery”. Like several previous studies the scientists attempt to illuminate the origin of flowering plants with a combination of phylogenetic inferences and molecular clock data.

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"Therefore they built “the tree of life for almost 8,000 (about 60%) angiosperm genera using a standardized set of 353 nuclear genes”, which represents a “15-fold increase in genus-level sampling relative to comparable nuclear studies”. They scaled this tree to time using 200 fossils as calibration points for the dating of the branching events. Their results showed “that early angiosperm evolution was characterized by high gene tree conflict and explosive diversification, giving rise to more than 80% of extant angiosperm orders.”

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"Our dated tree corroborates the existence of a distinct early burst of diversification, associated with high levels of gene tree conflict, further increasing our confidence in this finding.

"More than 80% of extant angiosperm orders originated during the early burst of diversification.

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"In the young tree, the early burst occurs during the Cretaceous, consistent with the hypothesis that a Cretaceous terrestrial revolution was triggered by the establishment of main angiosperm lineages. More controversially, the old tree places the early burst in the Triassic Period, which is dramatically at variance with the palaeobotanical record, highlighting that current molecular dating methods are unable to resolve the age of angiosperms.”

"Since this notorious discontinuity in the fossil record did not get any smaller with 160 years of paleobotanical research since Darwin, but instead became more and more acute and empirically corroborated, we can be very sure that the gap is not a gap of knowledge but a real gap in nature. This contradicts Darwin’s explicit dictum that nature does not make jumps. Nature clearly did make jumps in the history of life (Bechly 2024) and this cannot be explained with an unguided gradual accumulation of small changes over long periods of time, but requires a rapid burst of biological novelty that is best explained by intelligent design.

Comment: another major gap in the fossil record, just like the Cambrian explosion.