Through the Earths history,on average,have plants evolved faster or slower than animals?

Question

Through the Earths history,on average,have plants evolved faster or slower than animals?

Answer 1

First of all, I want to thank you for your question. I learned a lot trying to find the exact answer.

Well one thing is certain, the complexity of animals is much greater than that of plants, so I believe that they would take longer to change - to adopt new rules of life.

At first stages of our planet's history plants evolved much faster than the animal life. Animal life couldn't have existed without plants. But then very soon ( :-) after hundred millions of years), plants became well-adopted to life on Earth and their evolution started to slow down, they didn't need to change much. As to animal life, our planet can't decide yet what creature is good enough to live on it, so we are continuously evolving.

Wish you nice evolution!

Answer 2

I'd say about the same. Plants colonized the land around 420 to 490 million years ago, in there somewhere. Major evolutional developments include seed plants or angiosperms. Some plants such as trees live so long, hundreds and hundreds of years that the generations are slower than animals; yet other plants such as dandelions have very fast generations to allow more mutations from one generation to the next. This colorful table should help.

Answer 3

Ugh I had to retype my answer, Y!A is working funny.



Likely plants, although it's difficult to make a generalization which such large groups. I say this because plants can undergo major genetic changes much more readily than animals, largely due to their modular nature. For example, gene duplications resulting in polyploidy and hybrids survive and thrive much more often with plants.



I am usually wary of using the term macroevolution, but in this case it's quite useful. While plants may evolve faster overall because of macroevolution due to the reasons listed above, it's less clear for microevolution. In this case, the rates are probably much more similar.



Nevertheless, it'll be difficult for you to ever obtain a clear answer to this question though, at least regarding microevolution. Measuring rates of evolution is controvertial, as it's difficult to be objective. Even using genetic sequences is difficult; are certain base pair changes weighted? Are junk DNA and coding changes weighted equally? What about duplications, and lengthening?



Sources (Y! having trouble posting separately)

Plants: Bone and Farres, 2001. Genetica 112-113: 165-182.

Animals: Kinnison and Hendry, 2001. Genetica 112–113: 145–164.

Answer 4

you could't answer that because of the fact it rather is evaluating apples and oranges what precisely is evolution and what's better is a monkey better than a reptile maximum folk will say particular because of the fact a monkey is developed yet while there's a nuclear explosion cockroaches could be the only element left on the earth so which you could't study.

Answer 5

they have had a lot longer



blue green algea , etc



3 billion years ago etc,



plants have more generations than people usually though, like a crop a year in some places



so I'm gonna say plants