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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · The Evolution of Trees · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

It's a bit hard for us to see on our kind of human timescales.

But on evolutionary timescales, we know everything.

that there's still a lot going on.

So, for example, we know that some groups are radiating really rapidly.

The Inga trees, for example, in the Amazon, really important trees to people and to the forest.

The Inga trees have produced 300 species in the last 10 million years, which is an astonishing rate of diversification.

We also know from islands, from weird things that happen on islands, that trees are evolving.

There's a thing called island syndrome where you get, for example, gigantism.

Think of a giant tortoise on the Galapagos or flightlessness in birds like the dodo, the now extinct dodo.

Well, in plants, we get what we call insular woodiness, which is when formerly herbaceous lineages become woody, not necessarily trees, but they become woody.

So, for example, in the Canary Islands, there are 40, 41 independent lineages that have done that.

So you get sort of thistles that are now quite, you know, well, they're stumpy trees.

My favourite is one that I've been lucky enough to see on Lord Howe Island, which is a little flake of a remnant volcano, two hours flight east of Sydney.

And there you can find a relative of the African violet, which many listeners will grow on their windowsill, a little mushy house plant.

But it's a great big tree.

And it's a bizarre experience as a botanist to see something you really associate with the forest understory there with its sort of spectacular waxy orange flowers.

They call it the pumpkin tree, I think, because of the colour of the flowers.

Tell me.

Not especially handsome, nor particularly tasty, I suspect.

But you see this happening on different islands, so it's really important in Hawaii as well.

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