July 19, part 2

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My red velvet daylily -- gone wrong.  This is supposed to have six petals...........

And look at all the stamens........

Here it is, with a normal sibling.

Fancy daylilies, in someone else's yard.

Oops -- another error.  This one should have 6 petals, too.....  Interesting how the ones with more petals have more stamens, too.

Crocosmia, showing its habit.

Daylily in the strong late-afternoon sun.

Cosmos.

Coneflowers.

Daylilies.

Milkweed.

The only flowers I know that look like these belong to butterfly weed.

I'm listening to a Coursera class on the Emergence of Life on Earth.  He talked about the ways people have tried to scientifically group related organisms.  Linnaeus (said by Wikipedia to have "laid the foundations for the modern biological naming scheme of binomial nomenclature") got us started on using similarity of look and function to determine whether one thing was related to another.

I'm guessing that was a pretty reasonable way to begin.  That way of thinking has surely been ingrained in our scientific training.  I look at the flowers of milkweed and butterfly weed, and think "surely these are related."  

But.  Now that we have DNA to go by, we can have a much (MUCH) better idea which organisms really are most closely related to which others.

As we map the genomes of more and more and more organisms, our ideas about the shape of the Tree of Life change and morph and revise.  Leaves, twigs, and entire branches change places, in a complex dance from "what we used to think" to "what we now believe to be true."

I remember, a few months ago, looking for info about the origins of various marine mammals (sea otters, sea lions, and whales come from completely different families).  I found then that, rather than nice clear-cut data, every Tree of Life I looked at was different from every other.  As we get more info (mapping more and more genomes), we have to keep moving things around, in order to keep them in line with the data.  (And, of course, that means "in line with current interpretation of the data we have today," which is why the Tree of Life is probably never actually going to be a static representation of reality..........)

I ponder all of this, when I look at milkweed and butterfly weed flowers.........



Balloon flower.

Note different stages of balloon flower, and also the black seeds(?) on the spent alium in the lower background.

Slanting sun on the treetops.

Liatris.

A zoomed in look at the other end of the driveway in the previous shot.

Quince.  These fruits are somewhere between two and three inches long.

Hickory nut.  It falls from the tree with a green husk. 

Under the husk is a tan nut.  This is half of a nut, with the meat already removed.  Hickory nuts are edible for humans, but I have never tried to eat any of these.  The meat is small, and hard to remove.

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