Conceptual beauty

"Darwin loved conceptual beauty: the revelation of perfect simplicity behind extraordinary complexity."

I read about Climbing plants in the book, "the history of the world in 100 plants". Like beautiful tangents, the book lands around different aspects of earth history, human history, science, evolution and the underlying principles of nature. 'By the way' kind of fun fodder for the mind.

In a note about climbing plants, it refers to Darwin's "On the Movements and History of Climbing Plants.". Can be found here.

What to me is interesting about climbing plants, quoted from the book (100 plants):

'Plants become climbers, in order it is presumed, to reach the light,' Darwin wrote. All plants grow towards the light, but climbers take a short cut, using other plants and other natural (or human-made) structures for support, rather than growing rigid stems. 'This is effected by climbers wiht wonderfully little expenditure of organised matter, in comparison with trees.' That a climber can reach heights of rainforest giants without troubling to grow a woody support system is a classic example of the opportunisitc nature of evolution.

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Climbing plants do not make up a single group. They are a bunch of often unrelated plants that operate on the same basic idea. They all reach light that would otherwise be inaccessible: but they do in number of different ways. They have reached the same solution to the same problem by different means: what's known as convergent evolution. (Classic examples: bats, insects, birds and the extinct pterosaurs all evolved true flight; each by a different evolutionary route.)

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Darwin's investigations showed that plants don't just grow: they also move. The tendrils and growing shoots of climbing plants revolve in search of something to hold on to: and some tendrils are, indeed, capable of noticing when they touch an object (Darwin used the term 'irritability'). Movement, a function of hydraulics rather than muscles, is essential for the life of the climbers. Darwin wrote: 'It has often been vaguely asserted that plants are distinguished from animals by not having the power of movement. It should rather be said that plants acquite and display this power only when it is of some advantage to them.'

The topic is interesting. And to see climbers and their tendrils in action, here is a short video: