1. Comment #395591 by Celandine on July 12, 2009 at 1:25 pm

Absolutely fascinating.

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2. Comment #395603 by Ubiquitous Che on July 12, 2009 at 1:52 pm

Interesting how I haven't heard flowers being put forward as a refutation of evolution by wackaloons before.

I'm sure some wackaloon somewhere has. There's nothing so daft that some nitwit somewhere on the planet won't believe it.

But its interesting that this particular objection hasn't made it into any of the common repetitions of the evolution-denial mill.

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3. Comment #395612 by Jos Gibbons on July 12, 2009 at 2:25 pm

Comment #395603 by Ubiquitous Che

I almost never hear creationists talking about plants at all. It's as if they don't realise plants are alive. It's interesting they can take such obscure examples as bacterial flagellar motors, but virtually nothing with plants. Ken Miller has pointed out that the position of grass at the top of the fossil record proves the explanation of it in turns of animals drowning must be wrong, as then grass would be at the bottom. They have not responded to this, but they speak so little about plants that's not unusual. Apart from photosynthesis, I don't think I've ever heard them bring up plant stuff ever. (I'll give you 1 guess what they say about said phenomenon.)

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4. Comment #395620 by Aza on July 12, 2009 at 2:59 pm

The great explosion in flowering plants during the Cretaceous Period is one of the great enigmas of evolution.

Therefore God exists.

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5. Comment #395642 by NewEnglandBob on July 12, 2009 at 5:28 pm

So, to sum it all up:

The change from a gymnosperm (conifers) and fern dominated world to a world dominated by fast growing angiosperms (flowering plants) is due to evolution by natural selection. The angiosperms took over because they had an advantage and were more fit to reproduce.

No bogeymen, no gods, no woo, just evolution.

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6. Comment #395648 by j.mills on July 12, 2009 at 5:54 pm

No bogeymen, no gods, no woo...

...and no evidence at this point. Positive feedback, okay, plausible, I'll bite; but let's not make the media's mistake of regarding every new hypothesis as a settled fact.

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7. Comment #395650 by SnapperLaFleur on July 12, 2009 at 5:56 pm

Awesome! Great hypothesis but we will need more evidence to support this idea.

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8. Comment #395653 by Rational_G on July 12, 2009 at 6:05 pm

Title reminds me of Loren Eisely's wonderful essay "How Flowers Changed the World". RD includes an excerpt in "The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing."

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9. Comment #395658 by King of NH on July 12, 2009 at 6:27 pm

2. Comment #395603 by Ubiquitous Che

Many of the actual problems of evolution never get picked up by creationists. Some even appear to be easy for them. This one would have landed square in their lap if they had looked (for ID, since YECs would have needed to believe in fossils). Also, though, is language. The evolution of language would be, I think, something the wakaloons would be all over like Jesus on Mary Magdalene.

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10. Comment #395661 by j.mills on July 12, 2009 at 6:35 pm

King of NH blasphemed:

something the wakaloons would be all over like Jesus on Mary Magdalene.

That statement is likely to outrage a substantial number of adherents of the wakaloon creed. Unless you can demonstrate its genuine scientific, artistic, literary, political or academic merit, I will require of you €25,000.

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11. Comment #395663 by zepcow on July 12, 2009 at 6:49 pm

All of that blatant sex on display was obviously too much for the big old conservative dinosaurs to handle.

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12. Comment #395665 by BeyondBelief on July 12, 2009 at 7:00 pm

Two comments: What about Ray Comfort's brilliant exposition on the banana? That shows the creationists have not totally ignored flora.

2. It amazes me how fast a meme travels. (or, when onc exposed to one, how it seems to suddenly be everywhere.)
I refer, of course, to the term "wackaloon" I think this came out of PZ Myer's recent posting of a response to two accomodationists, and now I'm seeing it everywhere.

Is it recent, as I suspect? And given the image of the "wack-a-mole" arcade game, I get double laughter out of thinking of Creationists as "Wackaloons": Not only is it an almost Victorian sounding term (pantaloons combined with wacko) but as with the arcade game, you can slam a Creationist on the head firmly (say in Dover v Kitzmuller) and they'll just pop up again somewhere else.

I also note a real fertile propagation of the phrase "woo" across the atheist blogosphere.
Anyone gathering a list of atheist created terminology?

Religiot
IDiot
Wackaloon
Woo
Creotard

Interesting linquistic stuff.

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13. Comment #395672 by Enlightenme.. on July 12, 2009 at 7:34 pm

We were due to come along soon after, so the place needed brightening up.

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14. Comment #395674 by Enlightenme.. on July 12, 2009 at 7:47 pm

Anyway,
One would have thought the fact you can get fertilised by the lifeforms which move about all over the shop, rather than just in the local predominant wind direction, would give you a distinct advantage

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15. Comment #395689 by Roy_H on July 12, 2009 at 10:25 pm

Comment #395665 by BeyondBelief on July 12, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Plus the fact the banana as we know it is a "Man made" fruit anyway, the domesticated version of it bearing hardly any resemblance to those on the wild plant it originated from.
Well it turns out that Ray Comfort has accepted 'Thunderf00t's' ( Why Do People Laugh at Creationists? ) challenge to a debate. Now this should be interesting!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQQbsV9g6U&feature=channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coMQswQHzno&feature=channel_page

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16. Comment #395738 by Roland_F on July 13, 2009 at 2:13 am

When I remember right the reproduction of conifers by producing huge amounts of sperm which need to be carried by the wind to another tree of the same species and hit there the female parts (Tiliqua, Fir taps ??) is quite tedious. Flowering plant with help of insects are much more advantaged to get fertilized by exact targeted insects. So the question seems not so much why flowering plants rule today, but how they got to be dominant. Well when you have a distinctive evolutionary advantage and 40 million years of time, I would be rather surprised if they would not gain the upper hand.

And the homo Bibeltrumperus or homo Creationists are not using plants too much in her cretinist or flood geology propaganda. First Genesis get the sequence wrong : plants before fish. They also do not recognize that all plants will drown under 5 miles deep water, that sweet water fish will die when salt water is flooding lakes and rivers, and the saltwater fish will die from the dilution of the seawater with too much rain, so the ark should have contained assorted fish aquariums and lots of plants on board as well.

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17. Comment #395747 by JesperB on July 13, 2009 at 2:45 am

@BeyondBelief: The term Wackaloon is at least 10-15 years old. I heard it first in a George Carlin skit back in 1990-sumfing, but I have no idea if it originated with Carlin or is even older than that.

On subject: Fascinating stuff. Of course the creatiobots will ignore it and insist that God created plants to give people something nice to look at while they don't fornicate. Praise Jebus.

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18. Comment #395779 by Ivan The Not So Bad on July 13, 2009 at 5:00 am

@Beyond Belief

My favourites are vicar/priest/bishop clothing based:

Frocktard;
Frockwit; and
Twassok

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19. Comment #395782 by irate_atheist on July 13, 2009 at 5:10 am

12. Comment #395665 by BeyondBelief -

Smegnorant.

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20. Comment #395783 by Roger Stanyard on July 13, 2009 at 5:14 am

BeyondBelief quotes the following terms for creationists

Religiot
IDiot
Wackaloon
Woo
Creotard

Add also:

Nutter
Fundie
Cretinist
Wackjob

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21. Comment #395784 by irate_atheist on July 13, 2009 at 5:19 am

20. Comment #395783 by Roger Stanyard -

D'Douchebag?

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22. Comment #395791 by Tezcatlipoca on July 13, 2009 at 5:43 am

Comment #395642 by NewEnglandBob

I was at a Darwin Day presentation at Michigan State Univ. and one of the profs who was giving a talk did so on the hypothesis that the emerging dominance of angiosperms vs gymnosperms may have added to the stress on the dino populations. Something about pretty much only finding fossilized gymnosperm matter in dino stomach fossils and corpolites. Stressed it was interesting and plausible but that it needed more evidence.

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23. Comment #396093 by bluebird on July 13, 2009 at 7:55 pm

Another good EarthNews article - always interesting & informative. The top photo looks similiar to Azelias in the Smoky Mountains. Anyway...

Audubon magazine recently featured this tome by Jonathan Singer - Wow!!
http://audubonmagazine.org/features0907/photogallery.html

Seems I've missed a lot of good Nova programs, including this. At least the companion websites are still available.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/flower/

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24. Comment #396609 by notsobad on July 15, 2009 at 4:25 am

By religious logic, god is a flower.
Just like it was a trilobyte for 100 million years and a dinosaur for 160 million years.

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25. Comment #396613 by irate_atheist on July 15, 2009 at 4:42 am

24. Comment #396609 by notsobad -

Except for the time when he was a camper and lived in a tent.

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