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Plant evolution : ウィキペディア英語版 | Plant evolution
Plant evolution is the subset of evolutionary phenomena that concern plants. Evolutionary phenomena are characteristics of populations that are described by averages, medians, distributions, and other statistical methods. This distinguishes plant evolution from plant development, a branch of developmental biology which concerns the changes that individuals go through in their lives. The study of plant evolution attempts to explain how the present diversity of plants arose over geologic time. It includes the study of genetic change and the consequent variation that often results in speciation, one of the most important types of radiation into taxonomic groups called clades. A description of radiation is called a phylogeny and is often represented by type of diagram called a phylogenetic tree. ==Evolutionary trends== Differences between plant and animal physiology and reproduction cause minor differences in how they evolve. One major difference is the totipotent nature of plant cells, allowing them to reproduce asexually much more easily than most animals. They are also capable of polyploidy – where more than two chromosome sets are inherited from the parents. This allows relatively fast bursts of evolution to occur, for example by the effect of gene duplication. The long periods of dormancy that seed plants can employ also makes them less vulnerable to extinction, as they can "sit out" the tough periods and wait until more clement times to leap back to life. The effect of these differences is most profoundly seen during extinction events. These events, which wiped out between 6 and 62% of terrestrial animal families, had "negligible" effect on plant families. However, the ecosystem structure is significantly rearranged, with the abundances and distributions of different groups of plants changing profoundly.〔 These effects are perhaps due to the higher diversity within families, as extinction – which ''was ''common at the species level – was very selective. For example, wind-pollinated species survived better than insect-pollinated taxa, and specialised species generally lost out.〔 In general, the surviving taxa were rare before the extinction, suggesting that they were generalists who were poor competitors when times were easy, but prospered when specialised groups went extinct and left ecological niches vacant.〔
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