Jurassic Plants Make A Comeback

Makarand writes "BBC News is reporting that saplings of the Wollemi Pine will go on sale by the end of 2005. This is the only plant survivor from the Jurassic age. After it was discovered in 1994 in a single Australian grove, the tree's home has been kept a top secret. Research to find the best way to grow the plants on a commercial scale has now paid off and the pines are set for a return. As they grow slowly and like low-light conditions they will be marketed as indoor plants." This looks like an interesting addition to any home, even if the article's title is a bit of a misnomer.

Comments

Re:The only plant survivor?

[VPN3000]

Yeah, Max, I was thinking the same thing. It's not like they pulled this plant out of a block of permafrost with a specific date on it. Species of plants come and go all the time, especially on volcanic islands. Of course, they are going to find undocumented plants every few years as these cycles occur.

The excitement in the writer's words don't seem so authentic either. I suspect that the company doing the cultivation is also the one who first reported this as news. Nothing beats the media for mis-guided information and free advertising.

Want to see a creature who's roots date back to the beginning of life on Earth? Look in the mirror. Wow. There, the same gimmik and you didn't have to spend thousands of dollars on a silly little tree.

Sneaky...

[Walkiry]

Neat way to get nerdy types to buy plants for the house.

Being a Biologist/Biochemist/Bioinformatician myself this looks like an interesting addition to my house, I'm sold! Now, I wonder of there will be a sequencing project for it or I'll have to wait until the technology is cheap enough to do it myself...

I mean, it's the best way to make sure it really is a Jurassic plant and not something that merely looks like it. Sequence the sucker and throw a massive multiple alignment into ClustalW. I wonder what I'll have to wait for, sequencing being cheap enough or terabytes of memory being commonplace.

Re:eh?

[SpinyNorman]

I think the intented assertion was unchanged survivor... it's identical to the fossilized examples, same as the Coelacanth can be considered a Jurassic survivor. One thing interesting about species like these is why they havn't evolved ... are they a genetic "dead-end of perfection", or is there something about their genetics and/or behavior that precludes viable adaptation?

Re:Jurassic? Australia?

[Flingles]

/me thinks that some smart people aren't smart enough to know when someones having a joke.

Hmmm....

[Arjuna Theban]

"It had been thought to have been extinct for at least two million years. The only known examples were fossils 175 million years old."

If all they have are fossils 175 million years old, how do they come up with the 2 million number?

Re:Sounds cool, but..

[thefirelane]

Considering the plants are much healthier, and live much longer than they would naturally... I'm not loosing any sleep.

Remember, this is a plant not an animal, don't give it animal emotions and senses when making morality judgments. In the strictest sense, all the plant cares about is living longer to put out more seeds.

Just because you like it when a tree grows tall, doesn't mean the tree likes it. It just does that because it is programmed to (it is assuming it will have to be competing for light).


Thanks for the troll,
---Lane

Market-driven species preservation

[rev063]

An interesting idea to preserve an endandgered species: make it into a commercial product! Having just the one grove makes this jurassic pine's survival tenuous at best, but when you can pick them up $10 apiece in IKEA their survival is assured.

What's next? Siberian tigers at the pet store? Blue whales for the home aquarium? Rainforest makeovers for your backyard? Y'know, it just might work!

No such thing as genetic perfection

[Mars Ultor]

a genetic "dead-end of perfection"

This is really a misleading term. There exists no such thing as genetic perfection, just as evolution on this planet will never lead to the creation of an "uber-species". An organism simply adapts to its particular environment, or fails to and dies out. Thus a shark, which is a supreme predator in the ocean, will not fare too long when placed in the Sahara. The same holds true for just about every other species - perfection is only achieved relative to a particular environment. That grove in Australia simply exerted no new selection pressure on the Wollemi tree. An exception to this rule might be made for H. sapien sapien, but one could argue we're operating outside of natural selection now (a whole new thread in itself).

Humans do evolve!

[Doug Merritt]

There exists no such thing as genetic perfection ...An organism simply adapts to its particular environment, or fails to and dies out.

Very true, and widely unappreciated.

An exception to this rule might be made for H. sapien sapien, but one could argue we're operating outside of natural selection now

Alas, a popular thought, but quite uncontroversially false, even though it has been suggested (largely for the sake of Dramatic Pronouncement) by a few scientists who really should know better. (The below comments are aimed at this wrong notion; don't take it personally.)

ALL that is required for natural selection is heritable characteristics (DNA) that have at least a little random mutation, and reproduction rates modulated by external forces (variable death and offspring rates).

That's why it is so easy to simulate genetic algorithms. Given only a few obvious, easy criteria, anything can and will evolve to better fit an ecological niche (or to maintain homeostasis in that niche if it is already at a local optimum).

Thus, to turn off evolution for humans, you'd have to eliminate one or more of those easy characteristics...yet humans still die for environmental reasons, our DNA still mutates, we reproduce at different rates for external reasons (we geeks should be keenly aware of the female choosing or avoiding mates ;-)

Therefore obviously Homo Sapiens still evolves. It is an extremely lame, incoherent, not well thought out argument to say that modern medicine saves many who would otherwise die without reproducing and therefore there is no longer evolution. Ha! It would take a lot more than that.

To paint it even more clearly, things like medicine and nutrition and technology merely change the definition of the local optimum and/or of the ecological niche...but there still exists an ecological niche for humans.

Come on, if someone is so ugly that they couldn't get laid carrying a bunch of bananas into a monkey whorehouse, then their differential reproduction rate is going to be lower than other members of the species, all other things being equal. This is just common sense.

This notion that humans are above even evolution is just another conceit, right up there with Earth being the center of the universe and man being created in the image of God. You wish. ;-)

Re:Humans do evolve!

[Doug Merritt]

I think you didn't understand the point. Humans to some extent operate under un natural selection now, in the sense that our selection is consciously directed and technologically modified.

I disagree with both...I did understand, and no, it hasn't changed to "unnatural selection".

First off, humans are not directing their own selection/evolution/etc. If we did, this would be a form of eugenics, which historically has been unsuccessfully attempted with atrocious measures like genocide.

If humans ever did stick with a selective breeding program (selective mating works better than genocide, btw), note that it would take about 50 generations for easy results and 1000 generations for moderately difficult results. Selection is a slow process.

And even so, selective breeding is merely a variation on natural selection; breeding new flower varieties is certainly not "unnatural selection".

In the future we are undoubtedly going to make strong use of direct intervention in the human genome, and one could then attempt to introduce new terminology like "unnatural selection".

But this still wouldn't eliminate natural selection in humans, because there would still be a differential death rate due to environmental factors, and there would still be sexual selection at work (short of a police state enforcing partners).

But that's beside the point...the discussion was about the notion that humans currently do not undergo natural selection, which is absurd. We most certainly do.

Re:Humans do evolve!

[fucksl4shd0t]

Going back to my original post, my point was that to some extent, we no longer evolve based on selection pressure a causing trait b to be inherited more often.

Natural selection is a process where a given individual either adapts or fails to adapt to their environment. Humans have traditionally adapted by developing intelligence: getting smarter. Because we've gotten smarter, instead of growing a whole bunch of limbs that make us able to survive in any environment, we are able to build tools, machines, and various other devices to adapt to various environments. The reason humans that live in the polar regions don't have to grow big bushy coats of fur is because they can make jackets and skin the animals that already live there. We can also make fire. Environmental pressures are much less, due to the development of science and invention. Now, in the years since then, has that allowed us to break evolution?

Of course not. Why? Because we have to keep being smart, because our environment is always changing. Now, when we say environment, people usually think of trees and dirt paths and streams and so forth. THat's also what they think when we say "nature". But your environment is everything around you, and nature is the whole world that conforms to natural laws. The absence/presence of technology has absolutely no bearing on our evolutionary status. Nor does it have any bearing on whether or not we are in "nature" following "nature's rules". We are always in nature, if we're on Manhattan Island or camping out in the Cascades. And we must always adapt to our environment, or die.

It just so happens that thousands/millions of years ago, our ancestors decided either consciously or not that instead of growing a bunch of different limbs, it would be much more efficient to work on being smarter.

This, I contend, is because we choose partners for more than just transfer of genes to the next generation. Think how many countless couples choose not to have any offspring - this trait is not weeded out of the population for a variety of socio-economic reasons. But that just underscores my point - socio-economic selection pressures don't exist in "nature"!

How do you know that the reasons we chose partners are not motivated by the transfer of genes to the next generation? How are you so certain that some people are driven genetically to not choose partners or otherwise reproduce? I further maintain that socio-economic pressures do exist in "nature", because we live in "nature". Even surrounded by technology. Can't break natural laws. Sorry. Socio-economic systems appear in the wild. In fact, many different types of insects have experimented with Communism, Socialism, and even the Republic. Monarchy, of course. If you look real hard you'll see the default economic system of Capitalism at work in the wild. As humans, we haven't invented any of this. We've just adapted to it, and adapted it with us. The only thing we can claim we've achieved is intelligence, and we can only claim enough intelligence to have adapted to every single environmental condition on this planet. And that only stands for the species as a whole, individuals frequently die in harsher environmental conditions.

Re:eh?

[RatBastard]

One thing interesting about species like these is why they havn't evolved[?]

The answer is simple and obvious: it hasn't needed to. Whatever survival strategy it found has worked well enough that it hasn't needed to evolve. That does not mean that other isolated populations of said plant have not evolved into something else. Evolution does not mean that a species can not splinter and have one group adapt into a new species and another group stay the same.