Mike Lyle wrote in message
oups.com...

P van Rijckevorsel wrote:
Clearly, the presence of fleshy juicy edibles near the seed has developed
more than once, in several different lineages. DNA has nothing to with
it.
[...]

But Dick's question was far more reasonable than you make it sound. I'm
rather surprised, as you're generally very helpful to enquirers. Seeds
_are_ connected to the parent via a placenta: I, too, assume that's how
seeds can give rise to plants not genetically identical to their
parents. Is that right? It also seems, to a non-specialist, reasonable
to make an evolutionary connection between the placenta and the fleshy
parts: is that wrong?

Thank you Mike. (Are you the same Mike Lyle who inhabits alt.usage.english ,
by the way?) I hope your reply will stimulate a more extensive discussion,
as I would like to know the arguments on both sides.

Another thing that puzzles me on this question is that I cannot assess
whether a fruit tree rejects "foreign" DNA tissue in the same way as an
animal (such as a human being) would. I remember, when a young child, that
my father grafted a small branch of a pear tree onto an apple tree. The
grafting worked, and there was no rejection. This must have been the
botanical equivalent of grafting a chimpanzee arm onto a human being. In the
animal kingdom, there would have been a total DNA rejection. This evidence
suggests that DNA rejection might not be so strong in the plant kingdom as
it is in the animal kingdom. So perhaps there is no need for placental
separation of the seed from the mother plant. I simply do not know, which is
the reason why I have asked my original question.

Richard Chambers Leeds UK.