Bill Baker
speaker
149 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Bill Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So by doing more work, we finally get a close match that I hope will cause less controversy among my paleo friends.
Well, being a tree has a lot of benefits.
It gives you more access to light, probably more photosynthetic efficiency.
It gives you longevity, perhaps makes it easier for you to disperse your pollen or seeds.
And because
These pressures exist in many different places.
This leads to what we call convergent evolution, the independent origination of traits in unrelated lineages.
I mean, there is, of course, selection to not be a tree in some places.
There are no trees up there.
be on the tree line in in the mountains because it's actually better to be able to die back to a perennial rootstock and in the desert it's better to be an annual and um you know live fast die young um in a in an environment where there is not much water um but as a result we see uh in the in the flowering plants at least we see many instances of plant families that have both
tree and non-tree members so you know we all know the apple cherry plum for example they're all members of the rosacea the rose family but so is the strawberry and everyone knows that strawberries don't grow on trees the same with mint for example one of the relatives of mint our little sappy herb is the great teak tree one of the most valuable timbers on the planet
And palms really take the biscuit because they can't make proper wood.
They grow a bit like Chris was describing earlier from a big fat bud on the top.
They're embedded in the monocots, which is a group that includes cereals, rice, as well as orchids, lilies, normally floppy things.
sappy things that can't make proper wood, and yet palms have escaped this constraint to produce trees that can be as tall as 60 metres.
And in the Amazon, six of the ten commonest trees are palms.
So that means the commonest tree in one of the acai species, Euterpe precatoria, there are five billion individuals of that species
of that thing which is kind of just pretending to be a proper tree.
Yeah, absolutely.
They are.
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