I've never really though much about the evolution of flowers though it is one of those topics I could dive into and dig about in for years. I was sitting in a swanky box at the O2 - the ones with catering and bartenders and perfect view alongside some still-employed corporate types. It was kind of a hall of fame of credit crunch companies along the corridor with Morgan Stanley & Lehman Brothers close to the not-to-be-mentioned credit crunch box I was a guest of. I must say, the company Director who invited us had insisted on paying the catering bill out of his own pocket rather than putting it on the company tab which I thought most admirable. I mean really. We were not actually networking, we were watching "
Walking with Dinosaurs" with our children in tow.
I had not been expecting much from the show and was pleasantly surprised by the marriage of animatronic spectacle with a sneaky science class lesson. It was certainly beyond pantomime donkey and makes me think my own childhood was fairly rubbish in comparison. These were life-sized dinosaurs, walking, winking, muscles tensing, roaring roaming about whilst a paleontologist fellow leapt about between them speaking about the evolution of dinosaurs and the changes on planet earth. When the air-filled pop-up flowers bloomed all over the stage, I nearly fainted with delight. We were in the mid-cretaceous period at that point and Mr. Paleontologist slipped in a comment about the world having no flowers until that moment.
I had never pondered a world without flowers. And I'd never really thought about the evolution of reproduction. Actually, I had thought deeply about it when I gave birth and thought human females hadn't quite evolved properly yet. I remember thinking it would be better if we could just pop out an egg. But I digress.
Imagine. A world without flowers. Then, they began to appear. I'm guessing it all happened so slowly that it was not one of those mind-blowing changes. The scientists do seem to say it was quite a rapid environmental change but I think they mean scientist-rapid, not human-observation rapid. And we were not there then anyway.
Changes we can view in rapid real-time is something our civilization is accustomed to. The computer has crept into almost every aspect of our lives and the changes it has brought, whether animatronics or world-financial trading have been immense as one considers there was actually a time when computers did not exist. So. What happens when the man-made rate of change accelerates past the natural world's rate of change? What then drives what? We've just wandered into a Philip K. Dick novel.
Ok. Jump Out. Let's go back and read a bit about the evolution of flowers. Many scientists from many countries have laid claim to having the world's first flower.
Here is an one such claim from China.
