Archimedes Plutonium wrote in message ...
I have made the observation that most every plant when it shoots from
its seed
with its first leaves, that these first leaves are rarely (perhaps
never) the same as
what all the other leaves of this plant matures into. Would it not save
the plant
some energy in its early growing if all the leaves were the same from
birth to
maturity?

Anyway, does anyone know if any plant exists wherein its first leaves
are
no different from any other of its leaves?

And the question I am mostly interested in is whether these first leaf
are an
evolutionary vestiges such as human vestiges of gill slits. So are these
first
leaves vestiges of all plants that can be traced back to some ancestral
first
plant. Or, instead of being evolutionary vestiges, are the first leaves
different
from later leaves as in animals the fetus is different from the later
growing
animal.

What I am trying to reconcile in thought is why would a plant invest
energy in
its first leaves of leaves that are very much different from all later
leaves, when
it probably would be better for the plant if all of its leaves during
its entire lifetime were one and the same type of leaf.

While others omg each other to make themselves feel better about being
jerks, I see that some of your question have still been left
unanswered. One concerns the evolutionary homologies of the
cotyledons, ie. can cotyledon shape be used for phylogenetic
relationships. Unfortunately, the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"
pattern found in animals does not apply anywhere near as well in
plants. This is particularly true after the seed is formed, were much
separation of form has alreadt occurred. The cotyledon's shape can be
fairly similar across several species of a genera, but it rarely keeps
this similarity over genera. This is because the duties of the
cotyledon often must be structured to particular environments.
However, the cotyledon's role does have a fairly large evolutionary
history in the vascular plants. It was a necessary adaptation to
support plant growth through to the phase where it can produce enough
food on its own by photosynthesis. In fact, the number of them (1 or
2) separates two major evolutionary forms of the vascular plants, the
monocots and the dicots.