Burger: Flowers

From Scienticity

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William C. Burger, Flowers : How They Changed the World. Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2006. 337 pages.

This is a book about angiosperms, in other words, about flowering plants. It is a charming little book, filled with things I wanted to know and didn't even realize. I've seen people look at various types of science and math textbooks at yard sales and used book stores, thinking that maybe this one will teach them stuff they would like to know, but in the end the textbooks tend to be too dull and difficult to read for adults out of the classroom to learn from. Flowers takes away some of that disappointment -- it's not a textbook, but it does relate lots of interesting botanical information without getting in the way of its interesting narrative.

Burger is a long-time fan and expert on flowering plants. His goal is to convince the reader that angiosperms are worthy of close consideration, and that they've played a vital if unassuming role in the development of life on earth.

Burger colorfully but accurately describes flowers as parties that plants throws for their pollinators. One of his points is that creating flowers takes a lot of energy on the part of the plant, so there must be a very good reason for going to all that trouble. Reproduction, of course, is the basic reason, but other types of plants have found other strategies -- not all plants are angiosperms. The big reason why flowers are a successful strategy is captured in another Burger aphorism: "The purpose of flowers is sex." Sex, meaning the combining of chromosomes from two parents, has been a winning strategy in the evolutionary race to survive. Flowering plants have become very creative about sex, too.

From the Acknowledgements (page 9):

When all is said and done, this book is about a very important group of living things that do not command the attention and respect they deserve. Because they do not crawl, sting, bite, or carry virulent diseases they are often seen as uninteresting or unimportant. Nevertheless, these are living things that, in the words of Karl Niklas, "...thrive without intention, build without blood or brain, move without muscle, summon without self-awareness, and feed the world without intent."

Rather than a quotation, here is the table of contents, which gives a fair and inviting summary of what the book is about:

• Chapter 1: What, Exactly, Is a Flower?
• Chapter 2: What Are Flowers For?
• Chapter 3: Flowers and Their Friends
• Chapter 4: Flowers and Their Enemies
• Chapter 5: How Are the Flowering Plants Distinguished?
• Chapter 6: What Makes the Flowering Plants So Special?
• Chapter 7: Primates, People, and the Flowering Plants
• Chapter 8: How Flowers Changed the World

-- Notes by JNS