Sioux Falls Scientists endorse What Darwin Never Knew
for moving beyond natural selection on to the
genetic mechanisms driving evolution.
What Darwin Never Knew
What Darwin Never Knew (2009) - 113 minutes
What Darwin Never Knew at Amazon.com
Earth teems with a staggering variety of animals, including 9,000 kinds of birds, 28,000 types of fish, and more than 350,000 species of beetles. What explains this explosion of living creatures - 1.4 million different species discovered so far, with perhaps another 50 million more to go? The source of life's endless forms was a profound mystery until Charles Darwin brought forth his revolutionary idea of natural selection, which he showed could help explain the gradual development of life on earth. But Darwin's radical insights raised as many questions as they answered. What actually drives evolution and turns one species into another? To what degree do different animals rely on the same genetic toolkit? And how did we evolve? On Charles Darwin's 2009 bicentennial, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, NOVA reveals answers to the riddles that Darwin couldn't explain. Stunning breakthroughs in a brand-new science - nicknamed "evo devo" - are linking the enigmas of evolution to another of nature's great mysteries, the development of an embryo. To explore this exciting new idea, NOVA takes viewers on a journey from the Galapagos Islands to the Arctic, and from the Cambrian explosion of animal forms half a billion years ago to the research labs of today. Scientists are finally beginning to crack nature's biggest secrets at the genetic level. And, as NOVA shows in this absorbing detective story, the results are confirming the brilliance of Darwin's insights while revealing clues to life's breathtaking diversity in ways the great naturalist could scarcely have imagined.
1-23-21 New light shed on Charles Darwin's 'abominable mystery'
A scientist has shed new light on the origins of Charles Darwin's "abominable mystery". The famous naturalist was haunted by the question of how the first flowering plants evolved. Darwin feared this inexplicable puzzle would undermine his theories of evolution, says Prof Richard Buggs. Forgotten historical documents show a rival scientist was arguing for divine intervention in the rise of the flowering plants. This greatly vexed Darwin in his final months, says the evolutionary biologist at Queen Mary, University of London. "The mystery seems to have been made particularly abominable to him by its highly publicised use by the keeper of botany at the British Museum to argue for divine intervention in the history of life," he says. Darwin coined the phrase, abominable mystery, in 1879. In a letter to his closest friend, botanist and explorer Dr Joseph Hooker, he wrote: "The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery." The mystery centres on the rise of the flowering plants, or angiosperms, the family of plants that produce flowers and bear their seeds in fruits. They make up the vast majority of all known living plants, from oaks to wildflowers and water lilies. Flowering plants appeared on Earth relatively recently on a geological timescale, then swiftly diversified in an explosion of colour, shape and form. "In the fossil record they appear very suddenly in the Cretaceous, dated at about 100 million years ago, and there's nothing that looks like an angiosperm before them and then they suddenly appear and in considerable diversity," says Prof Buggs. Questions raised by the sudden appearance of flowering plants are at the heart of Darwin's abominable mystery, he explains. "Why isn't there a gradual evolution of the angiosperms? Why can't we see intermediate forms between the gymnosperms - things like conifers - and the flowering plants? And why, when they appear, are they already so diverse?"
What Darwin Never Knew
Sioux Falls Scientists endorse What Darwin Never Knew
for moving beyond natural selection on to the
genetic mechanisms driving evolution.
