General Biology Seminar

Charles Darwin's 'abominable mystery' has come to symbolize just about every question about the origin and early evolution of flowering plants. What did Darwin think was so abominably mysterious? This mystery will be explored through Darwin's correspondence with some of the most eminent evolutionists of his time who were also trying to understand where flowering plants came from and how they eventually came to dominate most of Earth's plant communities. Recent botanical discoveries associated with fertilization and embryo-nourishing processes among the most ancient extant flowering plant lineages will be presented. As will be seen, current hypotheses for the earliest phases of flowering plant evolution are radically different from the static, if not dogmatic, views that dominated most of the twentieth century-- and a far cry from anything that Darwin might have imagined.