Quote:
Originally Posted by puddin
I read about the orchid in The Orchid Book for Dummies. I thought it was funny that they kept saying he was nuts, only to be proven wrong. It had to reproduce somehow. Or does it magically do it?
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Puddin, what was critizised from Darwin's prediction was not the fact that the orchid was pollinated by a moth but the fact of predicting a hawk moth with such an impressive long proboscis (12 - 14 inches long!). Furthermore, Darwin's ideas of evolution were quite new and revolutionary for the time and were not accepted by most people (including most scientists).
It's just like if someone would have predicted 25 years ago, that the genomic code from a chimpanzee is less than 5% different that the one from a human. For sure everybody would have laughed the hell ouy of it... and now we know that the difference is just 2%...
Scientific life is full of these stories
