I expected a note regarding "competition". This is indeed a very fruitful
area of research. Recently Dr. Bejan, a mechanical engineer (Ph.D.) like
myself published an article in ME magazine on the structure/priciple of
tree-like networks. He claims that his finding joins biology with physics
very nicely and that the universal tree-like strutures we see everywhere in
nature should be considered as a universal law, when a system grows under
constraints from a point to maximum posible space. A full article was
submitted to Nature, I'm waiting on it, the ME article can be seen at
<http://www.memagazine.org/contents/current/features/nature/nature.html>. I
don't know whether this falls into the "competition category". In any case,
natural selection and competition in no way prove macro-evolution.
Salu2
David Campbell wrote:
>
> > What I mean is that the
> >plant is not really competing but just following a law. The same goes for the
> >roots (geotropism -).
> These can be viewed as both competition and following a law-competition
> must be clearly defined.
>
> >BTW, nobody knows yet why these things happen in terms
> >of basic mechanism.
> I vaguely recall from botany class various studies that revealed
> differences in concentrations of growth hormones in response to the
> different stimuli (gravity, light, etc.) It seems like a good deal was
> known, though I'm sure there's more to be found out.
>
> David Campbell