Skeleton Flowers
Posted by whatyareckon on June 12, 2026
Flowers
All posts tagged Flowers
‘In 1879, some twenty years after the publication of his famous Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wrote a letter to botanist Dr Joseph Hooker. One sentence in particular underscored a vexing problem for evolutionary theory: “The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery.”1 By ‘higher plants’ Darwin had in mind the plants he viewed as being the most ‘highly evolved’, i.e. the Angiosperms—plants with flowers (with seeds produced inside the female reproductive organ). As BBC Science put it, “The famous naturalist was haunted by the question of how the first flowering plants evolved.”2
Although many evolutionary scientists since then have tried to address this issue that “haunted” Darwin, the problem remains. “One hundred and forty years later, the mystery’s still unsolved,” acknowledged University of London evolutionary biologist, Professor Richard Buggs. “Of course, we’ve made lots of progress in our understanding of evolution and in our knowledge of the fossil record, but this mystery is still there.”
So, flowers are still an evolutionary mystery, in spite of the vastly increased knowledge of the fossil record.
Professor Buggs says of the fossil record leap from gymnosperms (e.g. firs, spruce, pine trees): “Why can’t we see intermediate forms between the gymnosperms—things like conifers—and the flowering plants?”
Evolutionarily ‘out-of-place’
Buggs refers to “our knowledge of the fossil record” but this has to be selective knowledge. Evolutionists have to ignore or try to explain away various ‘out-of-place’ angiosperm fossils from beneath their supposed first appearance in Cretaceous rocks. For example, fossil “pollen of the Compositae” (the daisy family), which is found all the way down in the Precambrian, presumed by evolutionists to encompass the time that life first evolved.,3,4 This would mean flowering plants preceded the allegedly ‘more primitive’ plants, such as algae, mosses, ferns, and pine trees. Little wonder evolutionary theorists are ‘allergic’ to Precambrian pollen!,5,6
Flowers from the beginning
The Bible actually places the origin of all plants—algae, mosses, ferns, pine trees, and the flowering plants—on Day 3 of Creation Week; not billions of years ago, but only about 6,000. And from the Bible we can conclude the ‘fossil record’ does not display the order of evolution over long time periods, but rather the order of burial during and since the global Flood of Noah’s day, about 4,500 years ago.
So, for those who despite the evidence and the Bible’s eyewitness account want to cling doggedly to evolutionary ideas, Darwin’s “abominable mystery” remains. For Bible-believing Christians, however, there is no mystery.’https://creation.com/flowers-still-darwins-abominable-mystery
References and notes
- Cambridge University, Darwin Correspondence Project: Letter to J.D. Hooker 22 Jul 1879, darwinproject.ac.uk. Return to text.
- Briggs, H., New light shed on Charles Darwin’s ‘abominable mystery’, bbc.com, 23 Jan 2021. (Unless otherwise indicated, quotes and other information in our article come from this source.)
- Stainforth, R.M. Occurrence of pollen and spores in the Roraima Formation of Venezuela and British Guiana, Nature 210(5033):292–294, 1966.
- Bailey, P.B.H., Possible microfossils found in the Roraima Formation in British Guiana, Nature 202(4930):384, 1964.
- Silvestru, E. and Wieland, C., Pollen paradox: Evolutionists have ‘allergic’ reaction to Precambrian pollen—South American fossils more than a billion evolutionary years ‘out of date’, Creation 33(3):16–17, 2011; creation.com/pollen-paradox.
- Batten, D., Pollen problem, Creation 36(2):56, 2014; creation.com/pollen-problem.
Good Ole Charles ‘Darwin proposed that evolutionary changes occur by a long series of small incremental changes over long periods of time. Six decades later Richard Goldschmidt proposed that evolution happened by sudden large changes resulting in new organisms with new structures and functions, which he called “hopeful monsters”. A group of evolutionary biologists at University of California Santa Barbara claim to have found an example of a sudden large change brought about by mutations in a single gene in a plant named Aquilegia coerulea, otherwise known as the Colorado Blue Columbine.
They noticed that approximately one quarter of the population of A. coerulea in central Colorado had flowers that lacked the distinctive nectar spurs seen in Columbine flowers. Instead, the flowers had an extra row of sepals. They studied the genetics of normal and spurless plants and found the change resulted from mutations to a gene named APETALA3-3. The mutations made the gene non-functional.
Hodges, a professor of Biology at UC Santa Barbara explained: “This finding shows that evolution can occur in a big jump if the right kind of gene is involved. When it’s broken, those instructions aren’t there anymore, and that causes it to develop into a completely different organ, a sepal.” He went on to comment: “We did not have a good example of a hopeful monster due to a single genetic change until now.”
The researchers wondered how the loss of function mutations survived in such a large proportion of the population, especially as the mutant flowers lacked nectar spurs. The plants are normally pollinated by moths that feed by inserting their proboscis into the spur, which positions the moth’s head in the right place to collect pollen. According to Scott Hodges, “To get that many of this mutant type really suggests that there’s selection favouring it somehow.” It turns out the mutant plants can be pollinated by bees so they could still reproduce, but the selection advantage that enabled them to survive and thrive was the fact that aphids and deer, which feed on Columbines, did not like the mutant plants as much as the normal plants.
References: ScienceDaily 16 February 2022; Current Biology 16 February 2022 doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.066
Editorial Comment: Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958), who proposed the “hopeful monster” theory also recognised that some sudden large changes result in loss of function and he called these “hopeless monsters”. As the mutant columbines can survive, due to being disliked by aphids and deer, they not hopeless, but they are not hopeful either.
As the researchers admit, the change was caused by a gene being broken, i.e. a loss of genetic information. That is degeneration, not evolution. The plant has not gained a structure it did not have before. In fact, it has lost an important structure, the nectar spurs, which reduces its options for being pollinated. If moths with their long proboscises try to feed from the centre of the flower, rather than from the nectar spurs their heads are not close enough to collect any pollen.
The extra row of sepals is not a new structure, and the broken gene didn’t form them. The plant already had sepals. The extra row results from the loss of the signal to make petals muddling the complex sequence of genetic control that occurs during flower formation.
An extreme form extra sepals resulting from muddled genetic signalling occurs in flowers known as green roses. In these the flower bud can only make sepals, and it makes multiple rows of them resulting in a cluster of green sepals with no other flower parts. These are definitely “hopeless monsters” as they cannot reproduce themselves, but they survive because people like them and propagate them by grafting. Creation Research has several specimens in our collection of unusual plants.’https://creationfactfile.com/6475/hopeful-monster-flowers/
‘DARWIN’S ABOMINABLE MYSTERY SOLVED YET AGAIN as scientists have found a fossil plant with leaves, a fruit and a flower bud in rocks from Inner Mongolia. These are distinctive features of angiosperms, the scientific term for flowering plants. The fossil plant has been named Florigerminis jurassica and is the oldest dated flowering plant found so far. The fossil is dated as 164 million years old, placing it in the Jurassic period of the evolutionary timetable. Until recently angiosperm plants were believed to have evolved in the Cretaceous, (65 – 145 million years ago) but scientists have speculated they must have evolved far earlier so they had time to evolve the great diversity of flowering plants that exists now and in the fossil record. This problem was noted by Darwin, who called the origin of flowering plants an “abominable mystery”. The research team who studied Florigerminis jurassica commented that their specimen along with two other recently discovered Jurassic fossil flowers “demands a rethinking of angiosperm evolution”.
Sources: Science Alert 16 January 2022, Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 6 January 2022, doi: 10.1144/SP521-2021-122
ED. COM. Every time someone finds a fossil flowering plant in Jurassic or early Cretaceous rocks they claim to have solved Darwin’s abominable mystery. However, finding a fully formed flowering plant never solves the mystery of how non-flowering plants turned into flowering plants because, like this new fossil, it is already a flowering plant. In fact, this “mystery” will never be solved because it exists only in the minds of Darwin and his followers. Flowering plants have always been flowering plants – the evidence supports that just as Genesis explains it – because God created all green plants according to their kinds, which included the plants we now classify as angiosperms. See Genesis 1:11-12. It’s seen in both the fossil record, and in our observations of living plants, which always reproduce after their kind.’https://mailchi.mp/creationresearch.net/creation-research-email-update-9th-february-2022?e=ce21bf0337
‘Don’t you wonder how the Aftermath of Public Massacres will evolve? I mean, there has 
to be an end to teddy bears and flowers, right? How many candles can you light before the sidewalks are slick with wax?
Well, the mother of one of the dead victims of the Manchester bomb blast is honoring her daughter with a tattoo. Of a bee. Because it’s the old working class Manchester’s symbol. You know, underpaid worker bees. Drones.
Hundreds of Mancunians have been queuing to get their city’s symbolic worker bee tattooed on them in the wake of the terror attack that rocked the city.
Members of the public were filmed outside the city’s Holier Than Thou tattoo centre as they waited in the scorching sun, while other parlours reported large numbers queuing for the design.
Minimum donations of £40 were taken from customers, but many were paying up to £100 for their bee tattoo, with all the money raised being donated to the Manchester Arena Victim’s Fund.
The worker bee was adopted as a motif for Manchester during the Industrial Revolution.
Among those to get one done was Charlotte Campbell — whose daughter Olivia was one of 22 people who died when Salman Abedi detonated an explosive device after an Ariana Grande concert on Monday night.
As the mother of a dead daughter, I can sympathize with this mother’s overwhelming need to do something, anything, to make her suddenly and cruelly vanished daughter feel more present to her. But even had I thought of it, I doubt I’d have gotten a tattoo in a desperate attempt to replace my child.
Predictably, the sheep good citizens of Manchester are lining up behind this mum, waiting to get their skins inked, too. Why, that’ll show those terrorists! At forty pounds a pop, and even more from those who can afford it, these monies are going to be donated to “The Manchester Area Victims’ Fund”.
But it gets worse. The Mail reports:
Her distraught mother described the heart-sinking moment a police liaison officer told her Olivia had died.
She said: ‘I got the call, I was outside and I got the horrific news. I looked up to the sky and a shooting star went across.
‘At that time I didn’t think anything but I look back now and it was Oli passing over. It was phenomenal.’
Ms Campbell claims she received 18,000 Facebook messages after the news of her daughter’s death, the sheer volume broke her phone.
She has now revealed how the family want to make Olivia, who was a talented singer, a star.
They plan to rope Simon Cowell into this effort. He is no doubt hiding somewhere, waiting for the whole thing to blow over. And no doubt it will. If Londoners can get over the 7/7 bombings, Manchester can move past a concert. Look at how Paris has coped: y’all can do it just as well when the next slaughter happens, surely? Show those French how to do it.
No one in Manchester appears to be angry (though some appear to be barking mad) about the slaughter. It will make them stronger when they don’t get angry, see? And stronger for what, precisely? I do hope what they mean is they will strongly prohibit their teenage children from attending large concerts without wearing full Kevlar body armor.
Now some are muttering because the Queen went to see the victims (about darn time, your Royal Highness. Why weren’t you at Lee Rigby’s funeral?) but the star of the show hasn’t done the same. I would imagine she is somewhere shaken to her soul, never mind noblesse oblige visits to those who were lucky enough to survive the carnage caused at her venue.
Islamic terror will change how we live. It will damage us economically — want to visit a mall? It will trap us into a spiritual vacuum — i.e., what’s the point of fighting back when you’ll just get charged with hate speech?
For years, Brits have told me, “you just wait. The day will come when we won’t take it anymore. And then you’ll see some bloody changes”. Well, the day has come — it has dawned several times now — and I see no changes. Nothing. Just an ever more repressive government.
Getting your skin inked in a medically questionable procedure isn’t gonna do it, y’all. Not even close.
And you don’t need a Victims’ Fund in Manchester. You need a Fighters’ Fund, for heaven’s sake! Fight back while you can or continue to watch your children die… if enough of you man up, including the mothers, the police can’t put you all in jail. Overwhelm them with your numbers and your rage!
You don’t have full freedom anymore, do you? If you did, there would be gangs of angry dads out in the streets now. But the government was one step ahead: what do you think those protective government troops were designed to do? I believe they were a visual message to the families, as in “watch your step there, mate”.
At this point, Manchester, what do you have left to lose?’ http://gatesofvienna.net/2017/05/flowers-and-teddy-bears-not-for-manchester/
whatyareckon 