Adaptive values Selaginellaceae

[Curtis Clark]

At 11:30 AM 7/28/99 -0600, Daniel Janzen wrote:
>The nice thing about plants is that they demonstrate that you can be highly
>successful without a brain.

Somehow in my education I got the impression that scientists did
hypothesis-testing, rather than making up "just-so" stories ("evolutionary
war stories", as my pop. geneticist colleague calls them). Perhaps those
evolutionists of old were actually around to see the evolution of the
ligule, but I, as a mere hypothesis tester that has only been around since
the early Holocene, must content myself to ask what ligules do in modern
Selaginella (viz. Gifford and Foster), whether they do it in *all* living
Selaginella, whether the mucilage or the non-mucilage spp. (or neither)
form a clade, what might be happening in the ligules of the Isoetopsida,
and how the Lycopodiopsida get along without them. This is a whole lot
messier than opining that animals evolved legs to walk on land, but then
the same (obviously demented) evolutionists that taught me about the
pitfalls of studying adaptation also told me that science wasn't easy.
Maybe if I ignored my brain, I could have been successful.


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