P van Rijckevorsel wrote:


***
What a pity, by going the other way and by assuming that "small leafed
plants like direct open field sunlight" you might have come to the
further
conclusion that plants with small leathery leaves (let's call them
sclerophyllous plants) occur in sunny and dry environments. You might
have
tested this discovery and found that Google yields 42 000 hits for
"sclerophyllous". It would have been your Discovery-of-the-Year!!!

Actually I was going the other way but decided to delay it for a day or
two to see what adversary posts would be attracted by the comment. In
biology whenever someone raises a "generalization" the dumb folk are
quick to point out some exception to the rule. I call them dumb because
biology is a bit different from physics where a generalization is all
inclusive but in biology which is "physics in motion" there are always
rough edges and never all inclusive generalizations. But there are
always dumbies of science.

So to put my half baked generalization of yesterday into a better form,
I am going to include the small leaf having evolved in open field
direct sunlight conditions.

I do this by combining both large leaf with small leaf in open field
and seek a physics parameter of energy. I compare the large leaf of a
weed like Kochia with the small leaf of a weed like Knot weed. Both
love open field direct sunlight. One is large leaf and the other is
small leaf. But what ties them together is that the large leaf of
Kochia is because the plant has to grow large and fast given its time
frame of 1 year whereas the Knot weed leaf is small because it is not
going to grow large.

So I need to tie together the size of the mature plant to the leaf size
to predict whether the plant likes open field sunlight rather than
shade. In the case of rhubarb the plant needs some shading. In the case
of honeylocust the tree needs open field sun. In the case of yew trees
or bushes, since the leaves are small but dense and because they do not
grow tall means they want some shading.

I think I can tie together the leaf size compared to plant maturity
size as to whether a plant evolved in open fields or whether it evolved
in shaded conditions. Most plants from the jungle are huge leafed and
most plants from open range environments such as honeylocust are small
leafed. By tying together maturity size to leaf size I can eliminate
many of the exceptions.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies