My homie said that monocots are more devoleped than dicots. He stated some convincing points about that also. Googling it and searching in the internet said that monocots are more devoleped. But, dicots have TWO cotyledons. I'm asking this because, though monocots are more developed and evolved from dicots, then why the heck they lost all those cool features (like collenchyma, trichomes, secondary growth, palisade parenchyma and so on) that dicots had. So this is like "we are evolving but backwards". Can (de)evolution occur like this? Is it even legal?
by Disastrous-Web-9327
4 Comments
Im not an expert but I dont really think its scientific to say one is more developed than the other. They both are extremely successful and fill their own ecological niches. Evolution is not a hierarchical ladder with one species or clade being better than another. Monocots have some of the most successful lineages such as grass. Eudicots/dicots have far more diversity. Yes monocots are believed to have evolved from dicots but dicots have continued to evolve and diversify alongside monocots.
This question is difficult to answer due to the framing.
When you say “dicots”, do you mean *all* plants that are dicotyledonous? Or the true dicots (eudicots)? This is an important question, because the former group is highly paraphyletic and includes the basal angiosperms, while the latter group is monophyletic and diverged *after* the monocots.
Let’s assume you’re talking about the true dicots. In that case, they *could* be described as being “more developed” than the monocots because they are the most recently diverged group of flowering plants. That leads to my next question then that is what do you mean by developed? How evolved a group is? I think that question might be too nebulous to answer about two groups of plants that have been evolving for such a similar amount of time (they both diverged in the early Cretaceous).
Since the eudicots technically diverged after the monocots, you would be accurate in saying the traits that unite all eudicots are slightly more “developed” than those that unite all monocots, but that doesn’t mean exact dicot species are on average more developed than extant monocots species.
Long story short, I don’t think there is a way of framing this question to get a satisfactory “yes or no”. Lots of apples to oranges.
Having this question points to fundamental misunderstanding of what’s going on. There is not one better than the other. This is the not very fun actual answer
Apart from their own niches, generally speaking of, dicots do have better and devoleped body design than monocots. Let’s not look at who is successful in living, let us look at who is sophisticated and complex in terms of their body design and efficiency, like how we say humans are the dominant creatures in this world due to our intelligence. If we do, then obviously dicots are more developed. Then why everyone is supporting monocots?