Photo credit: Baltimore Sun/Susan Reimer

Carl Zimmer of the New York Times is writing about "the origin of the flower," with apologies to Charles Darwin, author of "The Origin of the Species."

In fact, Zimmer writes, the ancestry of flowers has baffled generations of scientists since Darwin. There was no good reason why the flower survived in the shadow - literally - of much larger shrubs and trees. And the incredible diversity is another mystery.

Here is something of what Zimmer wrote.

Darwin could see for himself how successful flowering plants had become. They make up the majority of living plant species, and they dominate many of the world’s ecosystems, from rain forests to grasslands. They also dominate our farms. Out of flowers come most of the calories humans consume, in the form of foods like corn, rice and wheat. Flowers are also impressive in their sheer diversity of forms and colors, from lush, full-bodied roses to spiderlike orchids to calla lilies shaped like urns.

The fossil record, however, offered Darwin little enlightenment about the early evolution of flowers....

...scientists are [now] finding a wealth of clues in living flowers and their genes. They are teasing apart the recipes encoded in plant DNA for building different kinds of flowers. Their research indicates that flowers evolved into their marvelous diversity in much the same way as [human] eyes and limbs have: through the recycling of old genes for new jobs.

Amazing stuff.