Babies in protective escape pods, like a bunch of little Kal-Els.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Pollen kind of is analogous to semen in a very broad sense, though, in as much as the pollen grain produces (rather than carries) sperm and delivers it to the ovule, right? It's not the same when examined closely, but that's the point of analogies. Grainy semen.
I mean sort-of but not. Matrotrophy evolved independently, so there is no relationship between the "smaller, mobile gametophyte" in plants and the "small mobile gamete" in animals. It's just coincidence/ convergence.
And we know that it absolutely is coincident/ convergence, because in the evolutionary ancestors of vascular plants, its the haploid phase that form large bodies, and the diploid phase that analogous to sperm/pollen and eggs/megasporangia.
So like, mosses, green algae, red algae. They do things very differently than vascular plants.
I won't argue the point further than this message, and I appreciate the details you've provided, but the point of analogies is drawing parallels to quickly aid understanding at a surface level.
Nothing analogous to finding a needle in a haystack actually involves rooting through dry grass for a sliver of metal, but the analogy still stands.
The limits of metaphor are when they do more to disguise than to explain.
We shouldn't confuse things that can be difficult or require significant study to understand or explain with convenient but wrong stories.
If a metaphor fails the first test, than we shouldn't use it.
I agree - but parallels can be a quick and effective way to communicate information where the specifics aren't important, even if they have to be consciously discarded for someone diving further into the detail.
Right but the poofy dandelions aren't pollen they're seeds.
Sure, but OP's image says:
hell, pollen isn't analogous to sperm,