In the Galapagos, tomatoes appear to be growing backwards

The famous illustration of the “march of progress,” which shows the transition from ape to man and which we all saw in school, usually represents evolution as a one-way street towards increasing complexity. But we know that this diagram is far too simplistic, because there are also rare cases of evolutionary regression, such as some wild tomatoes from the Galapagos Islands “that have evolved in reverse,” reports the Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo .

A team from the University of California Riverside and the Weizmann Institute in Israel, whose work was published in the journal Nature Communications , has just discovered that certain Galapagos tomatoes appear to be turning back time, that is, they are reactivating regions of their genome that have not been used for a very long time. Here are the explanations.

By analyzing more than thirty wild tomato plants growing on this Ecuadorian Pacific archipelago dear to Charles Darwin, researchers realized that these members of the Solanaceae family – to which eggplants, potatoes and peppers also belong – do not all defend themselves in the same way against predators, explains Popular Mechanics .

“The team analyzed tomato alkaloids, bitter molecules that