Information Related to "What About Plant Evolution?"
Good News subscriptionAudio/Video
view Beyond Today

What About Plant Evolution?

It might come as a surprise to realize Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species hardly touched on plant evolution. After all, plants make up half of living things on earth. Yet the supposed main mechanisms of evolution for developing new species-natural selection and mutation-have not explained either the sudden appearance of plants in the fossil record or why most plants have remained essentially the same today as in the past.

Darwin, of course, knew of the problem-which is why he hardly broached the subject in his book. Years later, he confessed to his good friend, botanist Joseph Hooker, that the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record was an "abominable mystery." In fact, just about everything dealing with the appearance of plants is, for evolutionists, an "abominable mystery."

Some 375,000 species of plants exist on earth today, and most have not noticeably changed from the way they first appear in the fossil record. As geneticist and biologist Jerry Bergman notes: "A major problem for Neo-Darwinism is the complete lack of evidence for plant evolution in the fossil record. As a whole, the fossil evidence of prehistoric plants is actually very good, yet no convincing transitional forms have been discoveredin the abundant plant fossil record" ("The Evolution of Plants: A Major Problem for Darwinists," Technical Journal, 2002, online edition, emphasis added throughout).

Moreover, evolution's principle of the "survival of the fittest" doesn't apply in the same way to plants. After all, most plants, unlike animals, possess chlorophyll and do not have to kill or compete to eat, since they can produce their own food through the process of photosynthesis. So the idea that plants must compete against other plants to survive is not generally applicable. Even those plants that do eat living things, such as the Venus flytrap, do not eat other plants, but small insects.

Read the full article at www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn85/plant-evolution.htm


Related Information on UCG Sites:

Table of Contents that includes "What About Plant Evolution?"

Evolution and geology:

Evolution and biology: Search Our Site
Key Subjects Index
General Topics Index
Biblical References Index
Good News Magazine Index
Booklets and All Literature Index
Home Page of this site