Miklausen's 1997 book

[Curtis Clark]

At 04:56 PM 8/22/99 -0700, Ken Kinman wrote:
>  Monocots are purported to be more closely
>related to sphenophytes than they are to the dicots.

He isn't the first to suggest this (although I hope he will be the last
:-). It ignores the multitude of synapomorphies of the flowering plants,
both morphological and molecular. It also ignores that the dicots are not a
natural group (although I imagine that isn't an issue for him).

>     However, he shows great clarity of thought in discussing some aspects
>of the origins of life, that they were phototrophs evolving in cold
>circumpolar waters (not thermophilic, as Woese has much of the world now
>believing) and that chlorophylls did indeed precede bacterio-
chlorophylls.
>These ideas on early life are not presently very popular, but on those
>particulars I can agree with Miklausen.

What a dilemma you are in! That he should agree with you in this regard
casts aspersions through "guilt by association" on a hypothesis you hold
dear.

>     It still seems to me likely possibility that charophytes might not be
>the sole ancestors of bryophytes and other land plants, and there was an
>infusion of genes from other groups---if not phaeophytes, then perhaps
>fungi
>(I've now forgotten who proposed that)

A professor at the University of California, Irvine; first name Peter, but
his last name has slipped my mind, and the reprint is at work. As I
remember, he believed that certain features of "higher" plants such as
haustorial growth must have come by lateral transfer (back before it was
called that) from fungi.

The problem with lateral transfer is that it cannot be falsified; thus it
has little scientific explanatory value. It may remain as a viable
explanation when all else has been falsified, but that doesn't yet seem to
be the case here.

>, or some other group of protists
>(perhaps other hypotheses have been made that I have never heard of).  I
am
>still not enough of a botanist to know if there are any valuable nuggets
of
>botanical information buried in the Miklausen book.

But you should be enough of a scientist to know that these ideas are either
testable hypotheses, or else they are not science. IMO many are testable,
and resoundingly falsified.


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