Divining Plant Evolution from Uncooperative Data

A new book on plant evolution came out.  How well does it do explaining the diversity of the world’s plants via Darwin’s theory of natural selection?  The answer depends on how forgiving you can be with details that don’t fit very well.
    The book is Paleobotany The Biology and Evolution of Fossil Plants. 2nd ed by Taylor, Taylor and Krings.  It was reviewed by Jonathan P. Wilson (Caltech) in today’s issue of Science.¹  Wilson liked the book a lot, but revealed that the plant-evolution story is not easily told:

1. However, the molecular phylogenetics revolution, new fossil discoveries, and reinterpretations of existing material have catapulted our understanding of plant evolution ahead, leaving behind hypotheses and interpretations that were as good as fact a mere ten years ago.
2. Any book that includes two major thematic axes—increasing evolutionary diversity and complexity on one hand, and time on the other—faces a formidable organizational challenge.
3. Many environmental events simultaneously affect disparate taxonomic groups, whereas evolutionary innovations may lead to within-group specializations that deserve to be discussed separately.
4. Simply treating events stratigraphically risks giving short shrift to evolutionary trends…
5. However, a temporal framework makes it easier to portray the effects of large changes in climate and patterns of major adaptive radiations, such as the explosive diversifications of polypodiaceous ferns in tandem with angiosperm trees during the Late Cretaceous and Early Paleogene.
6. They give orphaned organ taxa (particularly foliage and seeds) individual chapters, in which they note tentative or speculative associations with other fossil groups.
7. Furthermore, the demise of the anthophyte hypothesis (which linked angiosperms to the living seed plants Gnetum, Ephedra, and Welwitschia) has left a vacuum that could be crippling to a book focused on the evolution of plants.
8. However, the authors took this development as an opportunity to recapitulate many of the hypotheses that have circulated in the literature over the past hundred years (some fanciful, others quite interesting) along with the available evidence for and against each.  By opening the door to a diversity of ideas, the authors turned what could have been a gaping void into an agenda for many a lab meeting or conference session.
9. …a comparison of the fascinating wood anatomy of the arborescent lycopods, the Paleozoic sphenophyte Sphenophyllum, and the early fern Zygopteris illinoiensis yields a powerful illustration of the effects of convergent evolution on plant form.
10. Their new edition has caught up with recent discoveries and the progress of thoughts about plant evolution.  It points the way toward the most promising avenues for future research.

One gets the distinct impression that 150 years of speculation about how plants evolved has been swept away by new discoveries, and that any answers lie in the future.

1.  Jonathan P. Wilson, “Evolution: Green Life Through Time,” Science, 3 July 2009: Vol. 325. no. 5936, pp. 36-37, DOI: 10.1126/science.1174659.

For those among us who are not Darwine alcoholics, this pathetic review reads like the blind leading the blind.  This is not just the “assume a can opener” joke.  It’s “assume a can opener will emerge in the future.”
    Did you catch how many evolutionary verbal tricks Wilson used in this review?  “Convergent evolution,” “explosive diversification” and “evolutionary innovations” are euphemistic place-holders for Darwinist ignorance.  They assume miracles.  Such terms do not inform or enlighten, but pull the wool over the reader’s eyes.  They allow the self-proclaimed shamans of scientific divination to dodge falsifying empirical data while pushing their scientific answers into that explanatory Neverland that never arrives – those tantalizing “more promising avenues for future research.”
    Take a lesson from this one quote that should turn on the fire alarms: Wilson spoke of new discoveries and ideas that were “leaving behind hypotheses and interpretations that were as good as fact a mere ten years ago.”  And you thought that facts were facts that never changed.  No: to a Darwinist, a fact is whatever serves to maintain public faith in the Darwin Party Treasury of Knowledge.
    Count on it: if you were to read papers on plant evolution ten years ago, those hypotheses and interpretations would have been presented via that famous slogan of hubris, “We now know…”  The book authors and book reviewers of ten years ago, and twenty, and a hundred, would have stood on their styrofoam podiums and announced to the world that science has made progress explaining the evolution of plants.  But now, Wilson is telling us that those hypotheses and interpretations that were as good as fact then have been left behind.  It doesn’t take much logic to deduce that ten years into our future an article in Science or Nature will be repeating the same sales pitch.
    Did Wilson present anything in his review to provide hope that the Darwin Treasury is making progress?  No; all the empirical facts, whether from molecular biology or fossils, have only confused the picture for them, and their leading hypothesis, the anthophyte hypothesis, has collapsed, leading to a “gaping void” and “vacuum” that neither Wilson nor the book could fill.  Notice how Wilson turned this embarrassing falsification into a vindication: “By opening the door to a diversity of ideas, the authors turned what could have been a gaping void into an agenda for many a lab meeting or conference session.”  There they go again!  Vapor and futureware.  Their “agenda” is to keep kicking the can up the street while hoping a can opener will show up.  This is the kind of slick marketeering that keeps the gullible throwing their life savings into a gaping void in hopes of striking it rich some day.  The salesman’s air of confidence sweeps them off their feet, short-circuits their common sense, and prevents them from seeking objective counsel elsewhere.
    By getting unqualified approval from Science for this campaign, Wilson and Taylor and Krings just Madoff with a fortune in public trust.  How people can continue to invest their intellectual assets into this Darwin Ponzi scheme is a tragedy and a catastrophe.