Let's Stop Teaching about Sex (Of the Flowering Plants)

Abstract

Misconceptions continue to persist in high school biology, even though the high school biology curriculum has recently undergone mammoth revision. In our schools there is a lag between what is taught and what should be taught. The gap between our ideals for the schools and what is found in actual practice in the schools is quite formidable. It is the purpose of this paper to examine in its many facets one of the misconceptions that has long been part of the high school biology curriculum. A concept having wide currency pictures some flowering plants that we see as having separate sexes, and female, in the same manner that we have separate sexes in animals. In some cases the plant is considered to be or because on a single plant you have only staminate (so-called male) flowers or pistillate (so-called female) flowers on a single plant. In other cases, while borne on the same plant, there are separate and distinct staminate (so-called male) and pistillate (so-called female) flowers. This is in contrast to the more usual arrangement in the flowering plants where the stamen and the pistil are a part of the same flower. In all of the cases the transfer of the pollen from the anther of the stamen to the stigma of the pistil, that is, pollination, is frequently pictured as being comparable to fertilization that occurs in animals. Such a concept is actually somewhat outdated .. . by over a hundred years! Consideration will first be given to where the concept of sexuality of flowering plants arose. From inscriptions on monuments found in the Near East, it is surmised that the ancient Babylonians recognized the difference in behavior of date palms which they cultivated as early as 2000 B.C. In a quite understandable attempt to homologize the palms with man, the Babylonians probably regarded the offspring-bearing, or fruit-bearing date palms as and the non-fruit-bearing date palms as male. In order to increase the yield of fruit of the date palm they most likely brought the flowers of the so-called male trees together with the flowers of the so-called female trees. In the 4th century B.C. the Greek botanist, Theophrastus, described the methods used in date and fig culture in his book, History of Plants, thus: With dates it is helpful to bring the to the female; for it is the which causes the fruit to persist and ripen, . . . The process is thus performed: when the palm is in flower, they at once cut off the spathe on which the flower is, just as it is, and shake the bloom with the flower and the dust over the fruit of the female, and, if this is done to it, it retains the fruit and does not shed it. In the case both of the fig and of the date it appears that the 'male' renders aid to the 'female'-for the fruitbearing tree is called 'female'-but while in the latter case there is a union of the two sexes, in the former the result is brought about somewhat differently.' Now this belief of the ancients is in sharp contrast to what modern botanists assert, namely, that all of our flowering plants that we see are asexual and reproduce by means of spores. These spores germinate to produce microscopic sexual plants, but these are not the plants we see, nor do these sexual plants bear flowers!