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The Variation of Some California Plants

1904; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/328570

1940-1205

Edwin Bingham Copeland,

Plant Reproductive Biology

In this part of California, where conditions are locally very diverse, plants are more variable congenitally than in regions where the environment is uniform. For in the latter, natural selection acts along the same line on many generations, and the more closely plants breed true to forms fitted to their uniform environment the better are their chances of perpetuation; while here natural selection is unlikely to work in the same way on many generations of variable plants; and breeding very close to a form fitted to any one sort of environment decreases the number of the plant's prospective descendants. For the same reason, the ubiquists in this region are more variable than the plants of restricted occurrence. Their variation enables them to be ubiquists, and being ubiquists keeps them variable. "Mutations," or discontinuous variations, and the most insignificant of individual variations are parts of one unbroken series.