• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

New Light Shed On Charles Darwin's 'Abominable Mystery'

Comfortably Numb

Antediluvian
Joined
Aug 7, 2018
Messages
9,008
Location
Phone
New light shed on Charles Darwin's 'abominable mystery'

By Helen Briggs
BBC Science correspondent
23 January, 2020

A scientist has shed new light on the origins of Charles Darwin's "abominable mystery".

The famous naturalist was haunted by the question of how the first flowering plants evolved.

Darwin feared this inexplicable puzzle would undermine his theories of evolution, says Prof Richard Buggs.

Forgotten historical documents show a rival scientist was arguing for divine intervention in the rise of the flowering plants.

This greatly vexed Darwin in his final months, says the evolutionary biologist at Queen Mary, University of London.

"The mystery seems to have been made particularly abominable to him by its highly publicised use by the keeper of botany at the British Museum to argue for divine intervention in the history of life," he says.

What is the abominable mystery?

Darwin coined the phrase, abominable mystery, in 1879. In a letter to his closest friend, botanist and explorer Dr Joseph Hooker, he wrote: "The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery."

[...]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-55769269
 
It seems to me there are three demonstrable bases for claiming Darwin was stressed out at the time over something that is no longer suspected to be as abominably mysterious as it seemed to him at the time.

The first basis comes from the paper mentioned in the BBC article, recently published by Professor Buggs (how is he not an entomologist?). Buggs' key point seems to be framed with respect to taxonomy, in the sense that Darwin's confusion was focused on (what is now considered ... ) a single subset of angiosperms rather than all angiosperms. As Buggs puts it in his abstract:

... Here, I seek to more fully understand what prompted Darwin to coin the phrase in 1879, and the meaning he attached to it, by surveying the systematics, paleobotanical records, and phylogenetic hypotheses of his time. In the light of this historical research, I argue that Darwin was referring to the origin only of a subset of what are today called angiosperms: a (now obsolete) group equivalent to the “dicotyledons” of the Hooker and Bentham system. To Darwin and his contemporaries, the dicotyledons’ fossil record began abruptly and with great diversity in the Cretaceous, whereas the gymnosperms and monocotyledons were thought to have fossil records dating back to the Carboniferous or beyond. Based on their morphology, the dicotyledons were widely seen by botanists in Darwin’s time (unlike today) as more similar to the gymnosperms than to the monocotyledons. Thus, morphology seemed to point to gymnosperm progenitors of dicotyledons, but this hypothesis made the monocotyledons, given their (at the time) apparently longer fossil record, difficult to place. ...
SOURCE: https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajb2.1592
 
The second basis concerns the amount of geologic time believed to have been required for flowering plants to evolve. Although the evolutionary trail is still fragmented, murky and subject to variable interpretations, it's generally agreed the development of angiosperms began long before the Cretaceous timeframe Darwin took as established fact.

... The apparently sudden appearance of nearly modern flowers in the fossil record initially posed such a problem for the theory of evolution that Charles Darwincalled it an "abominable mystery". However, the fossil record has considerably grown since the time of Darwin, and recently discovered angiosperm fossils such as Archaefructus, along with further discoveries of fossil gymnosperms, suggest how angiosperm characteristics may have been acquired in a series of steps. ...

Based on current evidence, some propose that the ancestors of the angiosperms diverged from an unknown group of gymnosperms in the Triassic period (245–202 million years ago). Fossil angiosperm-like pollen from the Middle Triassic (247.2–242.0 Ma) suggests an older date for their origin. ...

SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowering_plant#Evolutionary_history
 
The third basis concerns the fact Darwin did not have the benefit of later understandings of genetics. Mendel had published the results of his work with pea plants at around the time Darwin was fretting about angiosperms, but Mendel's work would not be recognized or widely known until the beginning of the 20th century.

The ability of angiosperms to cross-pollinate (with the help of pollinating animals) vastly increased the range and the rate to which they could generate and spread variants.

I suspect Darwin wouldn't have found flowering plants' rapid evolution quite so mysterious had he known of discrete genes, genetic interactions affecting heritability and the combinatorics of such interactions. Darwin's own pangenesis concept didn't account for or accommodate these factors. In other words, his conception of heritability was too conservative to allow for the pace of change Mendelian genetics rendered explicable.
 
It seems to me there are three demonstrable bases for claiming Darwin was stressed out at the time over something that is no longer suspected to be as abominably mysterious....
That is tremendously fascinating and insightful.

I had written a further comment, simply to remark you are such a fount of knowledge on so many Fortean topics.

Whilst that stands, I did thankfully note it read, 'font of knowledge'!I

(Could be a chat thread... 'If you were a font, which one would it be and why'? :))
 
That is tremendously fascinating and insightful.

I had written a further comment, simply to remark you are such a fount of knowledge on so many Fortean topics.

Whilst that stands, I did thankfully note it read, 'font of knowledge'!I

(Could be a chat thread... 'If you were a font, which one would it be and why'? :))
I'd be the one in our local church - it's Saxon, or thereabouts...
 
The third basis concerns the fact Darwin did not have the benefit of later understandings of genetics. Mendel had published the results of his work with pea plants at around the time Darwin was fretting about angiosperms, but Mendel's work would not be recognized or widely known until the beginning of the 20th century.

The ability of angiosperms to cross-pollinate (with the help of pollinating animals) vastly increased the range and the rate to which they could generate and spread variants.

I suspect Darwin wouldn't have found flowering plants' rapid evolution quite so mysterious had he known of discrete genes, genetic interactions affecting heritability and the combinatorics of such interactions. Darwin's own pangenesis concept didn't account for or accommodate these factors. In other words, his conception of heritability was too conservative to allow for the pace of change Mendelian genetics rendered explicable.

file:///D:/Downloads%20D/What_Would_Have_Happened_if_Darwin_Had_K.pdf

Abstract – The question posed by the title is usually answered by saying that the “synthesis” between the theory of evolution by natural selection and classical genetics, which took place in 1930s-40s, would have taken place much earlier if Darwin had been aware of Mendel and his work. What is more, it nearly happened: it would have been enough if Darwin had cut the pages of the offprint of Mendel’s work that was in his library and read them! Or, if Mendel had come across Darwin in London or paid him a visit at his house in the outskirts! (on occasion of Mendel’s trip in 1862 to that city). The aim of the present paper is to provide elements for quite a different answer, based on further historical evidence, especially on Mendel’s works, some of which mention Darwins’s studies.
 
Back
Top