Hi everyone,
Here is an article from the BBC about the 'abominable mystery, that even Darwin did not have a solution for....and still remains unsolved.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55769269************
The mystery centres on the rise of the flowering plants, or angiosperms, the family of plants that produce flowers and bear their seeds in fruits.
Flowering plants appeared on Earth relatively recently on a geological timescale, then swiftly diversified in an explosion of colour, shape and form.
"In the fossil record they appear very suddenly in the Cretaceous, dated at about 100 million years ago, and there's nothing that looks like an angiosperm before them and then they suddenly appear and in considerable diversity," says Prof Buggs.
Questions raised by the sudden appearance of flowering plants are at the heart of Darwin's abominable mystery, he explains.
"Why isn't there a gradual evolution of the angiosperms? Why can't we see intermediate forms between the gymnosperms - things like conifers - and the flowering plants? And why, when they appear, are they already so diverse?"
"Carruthers was using the abominable mystery to launch an attack on evolution itself," says Prof Buggs. "He thought that God had created the angiosperms in the Cretaceous; they hadn't evolved.
"To Darwin and his friends, this was anathema, basically, because [Carruthers] was trying to bring supernatural explanations into the fossil record."
But Darwin had a problem. The points Carruthers was making about the fossil record were actually very difficult to explain in terms of evolution, says Prof Buggs.
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Interesting!
Cheers.
Sriram
PS: Not that evolution by itself eliminates the possibility of 'divine intervention'!
