Evolutionary Gems Of The Plant World Shine Just As Brightly

摘要

I applaud Nature's initiative in bringing together '15 evolutionary gems' that provide empirical evidence for the process of evolution by natural selection. But I was struck by the conspicuous absence of plants (not to mention invertebrates and microorganisms) from the list, which is intended for the enlightenment of non-biologists. This risks sending a wrong message, such as that there is insufficient evidence for plant evolution (or, worse, that plants are not important), when in fact many of the benchmark contributions to the understanding of plant evolution have been published in Nature.