Anyone else interested in this amazing group?
Palms are an awesome group of plants, with over 2,500 species! I donāt recall any palm specialists on the forum, as I donāt see palms mentioned very often, but maybe we have some closeted palm lovers?
Count me in. The wall above my computer has some beautiful line drawings of palms (fruit, juvenile leaves and other features). These were done by old botany lecturer the late Dr Choong Low. Dr Low had an unorthodox theory about the evolution of Arecaceae which he shared with a professor in Europe whose name I canāt recall.
Of course palms are monocotyledons along with grasses, lilies and orchids.
The conventional theory at the time was that palms were specialised monocots whose ancestors would have been small lilies and grass like entities.
Dr Lowās proposal was that palms were the ancestral monocots and had actually descended from gymnosperms, specifically cycads, and that grasses, orchids lilies etc. were all descended from palms.
Not sure if anyone is stilling subscribing to this theory but I thought it was kind of logical. Palms and cycads certainly look similar.
Thatās certainly the most out-there theory about any plant classification Iāve heard recently. Given that the monocots are nested within the ādicotsā based on DNA now I wonder if that fact would put an end to the palm origin theory or if Dr. Low already had an answer for that, i.e. that monocots as a whole are a separate and distinct group from the dicots and are more closely related to the gymnosperms. At the very least itās fun to ponder.
Also, do share some photos of those drawings if you feel so inclined.
Iām hoping so - Iām new to palms myself in terms of any real focused study but the more I read the more hooked I get.
You could try appealing to artefacts resulting from lineage specific variation in substitution rates, but there would also be the issue that palms are deeply nested within monocots. (If you are appealing to long branch attraction then the lineages involved have to be long branches. And youād need several layers of long branch attraction within monocots, as well as between monocots and dicots.)
I donāt take the idea seriously enough to go and look at branch lengths.
Thanks dblanco, here is a sample.
Donāt have related text to the illustration sorry.
The time Dr Low was espousing his theory was in the early 80s when DNA analysis certainly existed but was not as well understood or as widely used for phylogeny purposes as it is today.
I will reluctantly admit that the similarity between palms and some cycads is probably a result of convergent evolution rather than a close biological relationship.
Here is an example of the Macrozamia āpalmā which of course is actually a cycad.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/181159990
DNA sequence analysis didnāt really kick in until the late 1980s. Prior to that the tools of analysis were DNA-DNA hybridisation (looking at the āmelting pointā of hybrid duplexes) and restriction fragment length polymorphism. The results of these tools are somewhat more ambiguous.
Was it the Durian Theory? That has dicots derived from monocots, and monocots from cycads, with palms as basal monocots. (I was going to mention this as another false-to-fact model of angiosperm phylogeny, but when I looked at it it seemed strikingly similar.)
durian-theory-or-the-origin-of-the-modern-tree-corner-1949.pdf
Interesting. E.J.H Corner was in Singapore during Japanese occupation during WW2. He cites a Professor Koriba in the attached article. He was not interred at that time and was allowed to continue managing the Singapore Botanic Garden (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._H._Corner). After the war he came under some suspicion of being a collaborator.
I know Choong Low was also in Singapore during WW2 as a teenager where he worked as a houseboy for Japanese officers. I wonder did he ever meet E. Corner or was he familiar with his work?