Apologies for the long radio silence. Travelling and the obligatory pre-travelling frenzy shut down the blogging assembly line for a couple weeks. Having wrapped up my west-coast jaunt (thanks to the great crowd that came out for the CSPAN taping at Stanford), I can write a bit about some of the new science that has caught my eye.
Author: admin
If you live in the Bay Area, please join me noon on Monday, February 23, at Stanford University for a talk about Soul Made Flesh. (Here are all the details.)
My wife and I have two lovely daughters: Charlotte is two and a half, and Veronica is seven weeks. And we are tired. We think of ourselves as being on the losing end of a tag-team wrestling match–particularly at about seven in the morning, after Veronica has gone through a few hours of pre-dawn nursing, squirming, groaning, crying, spewing, and nursing. Just when she has faded off into angelic sleep, Charlotte wakes up from a long restful night and wants to eat Cheerios, do some jumping jacks, and type on my laptop pretty much all at the same time. It’s like the Destroyer giving the Crusher the high-five as one goes out of the ring and the other comes in to deliver the final flying scissor kick.
I’ll be on Fresh Air with Terry Gross today, talking about Soul Made Flesh. If you miss it today, it will be archived at the show’s web site.
“Abominable” is not the sort of word that most people may associate with flowers, but for Darwin, it was a perfect fit. He saw life on Earth today as the result of millions of years of victories and defeats in the evolutionary arena. Flowering plants, by that reasoning, were among the greatest champions of all. There are some 250,000 known species of flowering plants, and the total is probably double that. The closest living relatives of flowering plants (pine trees, firs, gingkos, and the like—collectively known as gymnosperms) make up a grand total of just over 800. These numbers are all the more remarkable when you consider that flowering plants emerged around 140 million years ago, and gymnosperms had already been on Earth since at least 360 million years ago. In over twice the time, gymnosperms have produced less than 1% of the diversity found in flowering plants. What was the secret of flowers? Darwin wrote to his friend the botanist Joseph Hooker that this question was “an abominable mystery.”