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11 - Plants are used to having identity crises

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2009

Giuseppe Fusco
By
Rolf Rutishauser ,
Valentin Grob  and
Evelin Pfeifer
Edited by
Alessandro Minelli
Giuseppe Fusco
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
Alessandro Minelli
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
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Summary

Macroscopic nature is never really anomalous. Abnormalities, like other exceptional cases, at least show incontestably, what the plants can do.

Arber 1950: 6

However, regardless of how much faith one has in anatomical definitions, they should not be taken as more than a means of communication prior to subsequent genetic analysis.

Scheres et al. 1996: 963

Truth, except as a figure of speech, does not exist in empirical science.

Brower 2000: 18

INTRODUCTION

Our green and living world is a continuum in space and time. This view is well expressed in the ‘continuum model’ proposed by botanists and biophilosophers such as Arber (1950) and Sattler (1996). As an opposite view we may accept the green world around us as consisting of discrete units on several hierarchical levels. This view is called here the ‘discontinuum model’ or the ‘classical model’ because it has been the predominant view in biological textbooks for decades. Branching and repetition of developmental units (e.g. cells, meristems, modules, leaves, phytomers) are omnipresent as developmental processes in multicellular plants. These processes resemble the process of segmentation in various metazoan phyla, also occasionally leading to fuzzy borderlines between consecutive developmental units (Minelli and Fusco 2004, Prusinkiewicz 2004, Rutishauser and Moline 2005). Perspectivists studying plants accept structural and developmental categories such as cells, meristems, modules, leaves and phytomers as mind-born, simplified concepts reflecting certain aspects of the structural diversity (Sattler and Rutishauser 1990, Hay and Mabberley 1994).

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Evolving Pathways
Key Themes in Evolutionary Developmental Biology
 , pp. 194 - 214
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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