How Flowers Conquered the World

In the article The Abominable Mystery: How Flowers Conquered the World, the author describes Charles Darwin's experiment after he found the evolutionary theory and compares it to the recent testable and repeatable that were made.
Charles Darwin, an English naturalist and a geologist had still other aspects of evolution that bothered him, like flower problem. Flowering plant belong to a large and diverse group called angiosperms. Unlike all the other types of plants, they produce fruits that contain seeds in them. What worried Darwin was that the earliest samples in the fossil record date back 100 million years age and they came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. This suggested that flowering plants had an explosive burst of diversity very shortly after their origins. If this was true, then it threatened Darwin's entire model of evolution through natural selection.
A recent study showed that angiosperms evolve slowly, like other types of plants. But this still left scientists with many questions. In modern times, flowering plants make up about 90% of all living plant species. But scientists wanted to know why did angiosperms became so successful in spreading their population. And mainly, how and where did they originate.
As Darwin had asked similar questions asked by scientists who performed the recent research, he made several hypothesis. He inferred that if angiosperms had evolved gradually in a remote region of the world unexplored by scientists, then some type of event caused them to spill out of their homeland and spread rapidly across the world.
The hypothesis made by Darwin was proved to be slightly correct by modern scientists. The fossils of angiosperms were found in rocks in the unexplored regions of China, but angiosperms which were ten million years old were also found in parts of Europe and the US. A recent project called the Amborella Genome Project also revealed that the first angiosperm might have evolved from gymnosperm species that dominated the world at that time. Scientists think that the gymnosperm went through whole genome doubling. This means that the organism mistakenly gains an extra copy of genes during cell division that occurs in sexual division. This gave birth to new traits in plants and gave them a competitive advantage.
Today's scientists have a better explanation of flowering plants than Charles Darwin did, but they still can't explain the diversity of angiosperms and why they are not dominant in some parts of the world.

This article relates to the our study in the past units in many ways. First of all, it makes connections to the evolution of life and describes how life was in the early ages of planet Earth. It also discusses the evolution of certain types of cells and species. It also demonstrates the procedures of a scientific experiment. First, Darwin asked a question based on his theory of evolution. Next, he included various hypothesis. Modern day scientists then performed tests and changed Darwin's hypothesis slightly. Then, they made predictions and new questions based on the test. Also, this article gives information about invasive and native species and biodiversity as one can infer that if the angiosperms dominated the gymnosperms gradually, then the angiosperms are the invasive species and the gymnosperms are the native ones. Lastly, this article contains some information about cell division and what happens if mutations take place when the cells are dividing as angiosperms were born from gymnosperms.

Work Cited:

Barras, Colin. "The Abominable Mystery: How Flowers Conquered the World." BBC Earth. BBC, 2014. Web. 24 Oct 2014. <http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141017-how-flowers-conquered-the-world>.