Flora Unveiled

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vii vii

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Preface

In this book, we attempt to answer two basic questions:  why did it take so long to

discover sex in plants, and why, after its proposal and experimental confirmation in the late

seventeenth century, did the debate continue for another 150 years?

The answers to these questions have long roots, extending deep into human history, and

some of the same cultural factors that delayed the discovery of sex in plants also prolonged

the debate afterward. Some of these cultural factors are so entrenched that they are still

with us today. Consequently, we found that significant progress in understanding plant

sex did not always depend on advances in technology. For example, the crucial insight that

led to the full resolution of the question of plant sex and to the taxonomic unification of

the plant kingdom in the mid- nineteenth century was achieved by the severely near- sighted

Wilhelm Hofmeister by examining his hand- cut fresh sections using a relatively crude light

microscope of a type that was widely available at the time. Clearly, conceptual factors were

barriers that stymied progress.

In the absence of scientific data, cultural concepts and assumptions fill the gaps in our

knowledge, and these concepts and assumptions often remain durable long after those gaps

have been unequivocally filled. They are embedded in custom, economics, religion, and even

language, and they can make it difficult to uncover or accept new insights. Even when new

scientific theories have been thoroughly documented, older paradigms persist in obscuring

fact, propping up and “proving” the truth of groundless convictions. Invidious fantasies

concerning race are an example of this kind of fossilized perception.

Any discussion of sex in humans, excepting the most clinical, almost inevitably leads to

discussions of gender, and ideas about gender often take precedence over what is scientifi-

cally demonstrable about biological sex per se. Throughout human history, much of what

has been taken to be attributes of sex are actually assumptions about gender— the subjective