Flowering Plants Evolved Very Quickly Into Five Groups

27 November 2007

 Scientists are now reporting that monocots (grasses) and eudicots (sunflowers and tomatoes) are closely related. They are saying that it took 5 million years for over 400,000 species of flowering plants to evolve. Robert Jansen said, "If you are interested in understanding the evolution of flowering plants, you can't do that unless you understand their relationships." Anyone see a problem with that presupposition? Mr. Jansen has already determined that flowers evolved so now he is going to look at the plants we have today and determine what happened millions of years ago.

These tests consisted of taking the DNA sequences from a couple of genes of 109 of the 400,000 available plants. They then determined what belonged where "By laboriously arranging the sequences". In other words they took the ones that looked the most like each other and put them in a sequence that looked most logical. They also verified their results since they "double-checked against fossils of known ages". Lucky for them all the fossil flowers I have ever seen come with a time/date stamp on them.

While 5 million years seems like a long time, in the evolutionary scheme of things it is not very much at all. Trying to explain the origins of flowers and how they went from one to a half million in that long required rapid genetic variation. I noticed a similar problem with all the "fossil" vehicle that I have found. By looking at not just their structure but also what they were made of I was able to arrange them in an order to determine their evolutionary development. Using pure logic (since we all know that bikes, motor cycles, and cars have no creator) we can now more than ever show what happened in the past by looking at the present.

1. Looking at living things today will not tell you what happened in the past.
2. There is no fossil of a "known age".
3. Lining things up in a logical order does not determine a common ancestor, but can show a common designer.

University of Florida. "Flowering Plants Evolved Very Quickly Into Five Groups." ScienceDaily 27 November 2007. 14 January 2008 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071126170900.htm.