International Aroid Society

I will address several respondants at once.

hermine: "ps why is broccoli like that?"

Broccoli is a highly domesticated form of sea kale, as are kale, collard, cabbage, and cauliflower. If you look at a broccoli plant growing, you see the big, collard-like leaves, with the broccoli head coming up in the middle. Let that broccoli head grow without picking it, and it will turn into a flower stalk much like those of various wild mustards. Broccoli is like that because over the years, people selected for a thickened flower stalk with buds packed tightly together and taking longer to open.

Peter Boyce: "On what basis would the primeval leaf be linear?"

I was thinking of such fern allies as Equisetum and Lycopoduim, as well as quillworts, all of which have various combinations of linear structures which function as leaves. It seems to me these would have been derived from the strings of cells in filamentous algae, but I could be wrong about that.

Vincent: "What I mean by created was is in made that way originally by God."

I am familiar with all of this, as I was raised a creationist. I found it left too much unexplained, and had to do a lot of interpretation to make the science fit the foregone conclusion: as you do admit, organisms have the capacity to adapt, and this is the essence of evolution. As to the origin of DNA and its authorship, I never have understood molecular biology, so I refrain from comment.