Advertisement
Survey Series
For Advertisers
|
|
||||
|
Same Tools, Different Boxes
Convergent evolution plays out in plant and animal innate immunity
The Scientist 2004, 18(3):26
|
||||
|
|
||||
|
As life's diversity demonstrates, nature has a pretty large toolbox for designing adaptations. While in many ways an efficient builder, it often reuses blueprints, even if not starting with the same tools. Analogous wing structures in bird and bat suggest a why-mess-with-success ethos. New World cacti and desert-dwelling Euphorbiaceae in the Old World share protective spines and photosynthesizing stems even though the last common ancestor predates such modifications.
|