A really enjoyable and informative read. I noticed on your graphic that the starting point for the entire graphic is the very first land plant, and its a moss. The very first evolutionary step from that point has to do with vascularity. This makes me wonder what was before the first land plant? Some sort of water plant obviously but I’m curious what the major evolutionary step from the ocean to land was—what it means to be ‘moss’.
My second question is more open ended I guess, but thinking about all the various strategies life on Earth has developed to create such diversity in the plant world, and seeing as how many of them are quite similar across species, if you consider the vascularity of the post-moss plants as similar to the vascular system of animals, and the tightly packed wooden structure of trees as similar to bones of the skeleton, and the reproductive systems as similar as well, what do you see as constituting the “brain” or nervous system of a plant, if anything? I know it’s a weird question.
And this is not exactly a deep observation, but It seems like the discussion of classification of plants—but also the post you linked to—involve the idea in relation to rationality and maybe to AI, that these are all examples of things which are hard to define in a true/false way, and this is at the heart of rationality from what I’m gathering. I think I want to do a bit more research about apples as well after reading this.
A really enjoyable and informative read. I noticed on your graphic that the starting point for the entire graphic is the very first land plant, and its a moss. The very first evolutionary step from that point has to do with vascularity. This makes me wonder what was before the first land plant? Some sort of water plant obviously but I’m curious what the major evolutionary step from the ocean to land was—what it means to be ‘moss’.
My second question is more open ended I guess, but thinking about all the various strategies life on Earth has developed to create such diversity in the plant world, and seeing as how many of them are quite similar across species, if you consider the vascularity of the post-moss plants as similar to the vascular system of animals, and the tightly packed wooden structure of trees as similar to bones of the skeleton, and the reproductive systems as similar as well, what do you see as constituting the “brain” or nervous system of a plant, if anything? I know it’s a weird question.
And this is not exactly a deep observation, but It seems like the discussion of classification of plants—but also the post you linked to—involve the idea in relation to rationality and maybe to AI, that these are all examples of things which are hard to define in a true/false way, and this is at the heart of rationality from what I’m gathering. I think I want to do a bit more research about apples as well after reading this.