Before the seed. I. Guesswork

[-][anonymous]11y40

The easiest plant to formulate an hypothesis about was: [pollid:843]

(should we spoiler?)

General:

Expect things long-lived that make ooodles of spores since they have such low chances.
Possibly expect things that are flaky and can recover from near-catastrophic damage so they can skip the whole sporing process altogether - like moss and lichen - but less so than those since this has more of an interior.
Expect roots not to be the highest priority when starting a new plant from a spore since they don't have a seed with its startup food, and roots don't directly yield energy, while it's possible to get water from the air.
If roots aren't a high priority, expect a skin that can control water flow thoroughly, at least when young
If roots aren't a high priority, expect it to be fairly tough - can't recover from lots of surface damage until it's older.
Or it could avoid the root issue by living on/under water.

1 - Clubmoss - 35%. If it can make spores that fast it could beat the clearing rate; also, the fungus will need time to get paid for the support work it did. If they have kids really quick, the fungus could be getting a bit of a raw deal. But I dunno.

2 - Quillwort - 50%. On the one hand, Alpine tends to be cooler , and also this means of reproduction would tend to send it downhill rather than up, but you said it lives on rubbly slopes, and being on a hill would let anything that breaks off get far enough not to be in the way. And it could advance up in sporing, and the ability to spore the same year would let it live in the summer and spore through the winter. Also, just because it benefits from being on a hill doesn't mean it needs to be on a mountain.

3 - Asplenium - 75%. You practically threw this one at us with the hints. Still, Building exteriors are fairly inhospitable, so I'm not sure... Mortar cracks could harbor it though. Also, that picture almost looks like it's on a building.

4 - Salvinia - 60%. If it has until late summer for peak competition, that's plenty of time. The first few generations won't saturate the place... or will they? I guess it depends on the starting population and the degree of room to grow. If you're racing to cover a lake, you want to go early rather than go well. Also, more likely to mature quickly since it has ample water access. So, if given that it STILL takes until late summer for peak competition, that raises the chances that you get a lot of generations in.

[-][anonymous]11y10

Did you multiply your probabilities, or did you estimate only the last claims? That was an interesting and plausible analysis. What alternative hypotheses did you have in mind? (Me? Throw anything? Nonono, wasn't me...:)

[-]Luke_A_Somers11y10

It was so fuzzy - and more importantly, non-independent - I just gave a gut feeling at the end. This gut feeling basically amounted to, "supposing it turns out to be X/not-X, how stupid do I feel?" and taking the balance of those feelings. Basically, minimize regret since being right or wrong either way has the same impact..

[-][anonymous]11y10

Thank you. It is often how I feel IRL, when I need to, for example, compare two species. Maybe there's a way to formulate it clearer, and maybe subject matter/inferential gaps will always make it fuzzy - dunno, I am mostly trying to unlearn how it was taught to us in uni.

[-][anonymous]10y00

Oh, by the way, I should clarify that the really interesting thing here is not 'are the answers right?', but 'in what ways the answered questions are different from the asked?'. It took me months to think of seriously reading the post from a totally-not-botanical POV, which is a failure of rationality if there is one, and which is a reason why I am now even more horrified by traditional testing practices.

For me, those two brief Latin words which signify the name of the plant mean the world. I might not know the properties of the species, the genus, the family - heck, there are entire orders which I have never had cause to look up. But for all that, I have an idea of how narrow a category a species is. It means that I will automatically give more precise answers to such questions - wrong, perhaps, but at least more 'compact'.

A non-biologist will read the same words and completely dismiss the Latin name (which is one reason why I think Feynman's attitude to biological nomenclature is bad for people who want to understand sufficiently meta problems). He will see overlapping sets and try to guess the more likely intersections from scratch, or worse, since we live in a sea of seed plants and are more used to their combinations of traits.

So my (improved) model of the answered questions is 'if this thing, unrelated to any other thing, has a habit of doing X, how likely is that once upon a time Y up and happened to it?' or some such.

Luckily, I can (and do) review the literature to look up the frequency of XY among pteridophytes in general (but not seed plants, because that would take a Singularity) and then correct or not the position taken by (the only volunteer) Luke_A_Somers. Hopefully we'll see which parts of the species' descriptions were given more weight in the analysis; I am fascinated by the possibility of actually finding the 'weakest link' in the chain.

Just saying it here in case I don't get to finish the job.

[-][anonymous]10y00

Biology is neat like that, it has to make sense. I think the largest difference between math and the rest of non-humanities we learned in high school was that math doesn't (have to) make intuitive sense; you solve an equation, it's like you chop off a Hydra's head; they can just write another one almost like the first one, but with some other power of x or something, and this new equation has to be solved from the very start. There is no 'maybe I am a bit wrong here, but if I narrow down or widen this definition in such-and-such way, my answer will be right', just right or wrong.

I did like pieces of it, like mass point geometry which almost seems 'humane' in its 'here is how we reduce this thing to another thing' approach. Perhaps other people like me would be fond of it, too.