The Plants That Didn’t Evolve

Here’s a look at recent botanical news stories that should offer plenty of opportunities for evolutionists to show how plants evolved.

Model of ancestral flower. (Copyright: Hervé Sauquet/Jürg Schönenberger)

Those DAM flowers: Desperate to honor King Charlie in the story of flowering plants, news reporters went wild after hearing a press release from the Royal Holloway University of London that announced, “Revealed: what the first ever flower looked like.” Responses from the Darwine-drunk media were predictable, especially since the University of Vienna‘s press release included an imaginary flower graphic which inebriated editors could easily copy and paste into their breathless headlines:

• Did the first flower look like this? (BBC News): “All living flowers ultimately derive from a single ancestor that lived about 140 million years ago, a study suggests.”
• What the first flower on Earth might have looked like (New Scientist): Listen carefully to what reporter James O’Donoghue says: “Three was the magic number for the very first flowering plant. The largest study into their early evolution has concluded that its flowers probably had petal-like tepals [sic; sepals] and pollen-bearing stamens arranged in layered whorls of three. It bore similarities with magnolias, buttercups and laurels – but was unlike any living flower.”
• What flowers looked like 100 million years ago (Science Daily): “No one knows exactly how this happened, and the origin and early evolution of flowering plants and especially their flowers still remains one of the biggest enigmas in biology, almost 140 years after Charles Darwin called their rapid rise in the Cretaceous ‘an abominable mystery’.”

“These results call into question much of what has been thought and taught previously about floral evolution!“

There it is: the DAM Law (‘Darwin’s Abominable Mystery‘) making its inevitable appearance. So what is all the hype based on? When the fogma is cleared away, we find nothing to help soothe Mr. Darwin’s stomach ache. On the contrary:

36 researchers from 13 countries, including Royal Holloway, University of London have reported results from the ‘eFLOWER project’. Among the most surprising results from the project is a new model of an original ancestral flower that does not match any of the ideas proposed previously – shedding new light on the early evolution of flowers as well as major patterns in floral evolution across all living flowering plants.

There is no such flower on earth. It’s made up by giving some artist the traits the evolutionists think must have been present in the ancestor. Even so, clearly this ‘ancestral flower’ is all flower, and a complex one at that. It has stamens, pistils, sepals, whorls, petals and all; quite pretty, actually, perhaps worthy of being in a modern flower arrangement. The press release admits it has a ‘modern appearance‘ and makes a big deal of the fact that the new model overturns previous ideas. “An old assumption disproved” one sub-heading reads. “These results call into question much of what has been thought and taught previously about floral evolution!” one researcher shouts. So much for everything you were taught.

Despite the promise that this model “sheds light” on the evolution of flowering plants, it doesn’t help Darwin’s case for his disciples to show off a very complex, fully-modern-looking flowering plant as the ancestor. The depth of this problem for Darwinians can be sensed by listening to them confess utter ignorance about the origin of one of the most successful groups of organisms on earth – the angiosperms –

Flowering plants (angiosperms), with at least 300,000 species, are by far the most diverse group of plants on Earth.

They include almost all the species used by people for food, medicine, and many other purposes. However, flowering plants arose only about 140 million years ago, quite late in the evolution of plants, toward the end of the age of the dinosaurs. Since then they have diversified spectacularly.

However, no one knows exactly how this happened. The origin and early evolution of flowering plants -especially flowers still remain one of the biggest enigmas in biology, almost 140 years after Charles Darwin called their rapid rise in the Cretaceous “an abominable mystery”.

A look at the materials & methods used by the evolutionary team in Nature Communications shows multiple instances of incestuous assumptions, where they used Darwinian phylogenies, Darwinian timelines, and Darwinian molecular clocks to infer ‘ancestral’ traits. The fact that after all this DIDO divination they still ended up with a modern-looking, complex flower as the ancestor would seem to indicate, to an unbiased observer, that evolution really had little to do with the abrupt appearance of flowers. The authors say nothing about mutations, the fountainhead of all innovation in the imaginations of neo-Darwinists. And the very phrase that made Darwin famous—natural selection—does not appear in the paper either, except for a couple of fact-free, offhand speculations that some traits might have given flowers a ‘selective advantage’ here or there. For example, “What does this scenario of early whorl reduction tell us about the evolutionary forces at play?” [Note to Nature editors: evolution is not a force.]  “We propose that early reduction in the number of whorls of ancestral flowers presented selective advantages that eventually led to the extinction of its original, multiparted floral groundplan.” This speculation hardly rises above the level of anecdote. Besides, reduction and extinction are not what Darwin needs! It appears DAM just got more abominable.

Dodging the issue in bladderworts: Certainly the most interesting traits in bladderworts, aquatic carnivorous plants, are their lightning-fast traps that accelerate at 600 G’s (2/17/11). A paper in PLoS One about the evolution of carnivorous plants, however, only discusses variation in mitochondrial genome size in the members of the genus Utricularia, never mentioning how the incredible traps in those angiosperms could have emerged by a Darwinian process. There is no mention of mutation or selection. Readers wishing to hear about the evolutionary appearance of the “amazing piece of mechanics” that allows these traps to fire hundreds of times will have to keep looking.

Dear readers: we give you links to the very best evolutionary evidence from the leading journals and academic institutions. You can read what they say and see if it sounds convincing. But when you strip away the fogma, the Darwin Flubber and perhapsimaybecouldness spikes; when you are not intimated by Jargonwocky; when you disallow incestuous Darwinian assumptions; when you examine their methods; when you just look at the raw data and see what it indicates, what do you find? Creation! All the Darwinese reduces to hot air and storytelling. Evolution is a narrative gloss painted on the facts, not an inference from the facts themselves. Darwin paint turns beautiful flowers into black, hideous products of the Stuff Happens Law.

Tomorrow we will provide more examples to rub it in. People need to see the how the Darwin Party subverts science into Darwinolatry.