The 'abominable mystery' even Darwin couldn't solve

Orchids have been around for as long as dinosaurs, but the puzzle of their evolution is only now being fully understood.  

Next week, the scientific community will be celebrating the 150th birthday of one of the most important books in human history: On The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. In it, he explained how life evolved through natural selection, an idea that still runs like a leitmotif through every aspect of modern biology.

As the late Theodosius Dobzhansky, author of Genetics and the Origin of Species, said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

Yet even though he had solved the greatest biological mystery of all time, Darwin, whose bicentenary was celebrated earlier this year, felt beset by other conundrums about the natural world. In 1879, he wrote a letter to his friend Dr. Joseph Hooker, the director of Kew Gardens, complaining about the “abominable mystery” posed by one of the most common forms of life on the planet: flowering plants.

To the layman's eye, flowers might not seem especially inexplicable. But what puzzled Darwin was the way in which, after appearing in the fossil record about 130 million years ago, they instantly exploded into a bewildering diversity of species and reproductive techniques: showy, magnolia-style blooms; multi-petalled blossoms fertilized by bees; or plants that cast their pollen to the winds.

Evolution is a story of living things imperceptibly changing and developing into new species – so where was the mother of all flowers? And where were the intermediate stages between the different plants Darwin could see blossoming all around him?

(Source: Telegraph)

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