Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, shows the power of evolutionary explanations by taking a plant’s eye view of agriculture. It’s not just the content that I like, the presentation style is worth examining too. The talk is definitely more in the style of a naked Yoda than Darth Vader. It’s lacking details, [...]
Annals of Botany papers are free to access if they’re over a year old. You might know that if you’re a botanist, but not if you’re in another field. I’ve been writing for archaeologists about what phytoliths are, and why they matter.
Hybrid lethality is a type of postzygotic isolation and is observed in some species of Nicotiana in association with genes encoded on the Q chromosome. Tezuka et al. (pp. 267–276) make interspecific crosses of eight wild species with cultivated tobacco, N. tabacum, and find only one, N. fragrans, that produces 100 % viable hybrids. They [...]