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A morning glory opens before most people are awake. By early afternoon that same flower is already spent — curled shut, finished, done. It gets one morning. Everything it needs to accomplish, everything it exists to do, has to happen inside a few hours of light.
So a morning glory lives under enormous pressure to be noticed.
Researchers have now put a number on what that pressure costs. Over nine years, a population of wild morning glories saw its rate of adaptation fall by roughly 96 percent. Not its growth. Not its seed production. Its ability to keep pace with a changing climate.
And the reason is not the one that number makes you expect.
What Nine Years Did to a Morning Glory
The method has a wonderful name: a resurrection experiment. It is one of the few honest ways to watch evolution happen inside a human attention span.
Seeds were collected from wild populations of the common morning glory, Ipomoea purpurea, at two points in time nine years apart. Then both sets of seeds were grown together, side by side, in the same conditions. That is the trick. Because the soil, the water and the season are identical for both, any difference that shows up between the older plants and the younger ones is a difference the population actually evolved — not just a plant responding to a warmer year.
The team measured five things: the date each plant produced its first flower, how big that flower was, how much sugar was in its nectar, how long flowering lasted, and the distance between the anther and the stigma — the pollen-producing part and the pollen-receiving part.
Then they used a statistic called R, which measures how well a population is adapting across all of those traits together rather than one at a time. That detail matters more than it sounds. Traits do not move independently. Pulling on one can drag another.
The older seeds were adapting at about 76 percent of the rate that theory said they should. The seeds collected nine years later were adapting at about 9 percent. That gap is the 96 percent.
Nine years is not deep time. It is about how long a fence goes without repainting. Whatever happened here happened fast enough that a person could have stood in the same field and watched it.
And anyone who has ever poured everything they had into being chosen — for the job, the team, the room, the relationship — will already recognise the shape of what comes next.
Why 96 Percent Doesn’t Mean What It Sounds Like
A number that size sounds like exhaustion. Like something ran dry. Like the plant spent everything it had and had nothing left.
That is not what happened, and the researchers were unusually direct about it.
“The plant isn’t running out of evolutionary fuel — it’s increasingly locked into a trajectory that favors pollinator attraction, potentially at the expense of climate adaptation.”
That is Regina Baucom, a University of Michigan professor of ecology and evolutionary biology who co-led the work, published this year in the journal Evolution Letters. The study was led by Sasha Bishop, a recent doctoral graduate at the same university, working with John Stinchcombe at the University of Toronto.
Read that quote again, because it inverts the whole story. The genetic variation is still there. The raw material for change did not disappear. The population has not run out of options.
It has run out of steering.
The difference is the difference between a car running out of fuel and a car whose wheels have been welded straight. One of those is empty. The other is full, moving fast, and can only go one way.
This is exactly the sort of distinction that dies in a headline, which is worth remembering every time a study crosses your feed — the same thing happened recently with the sea squirt anti-aging research, where the caveat the scientists themselves attached never made it into the coverage.
Two Good Things, Wired Together
Here is the actual mechanism, and it is the part of this study worth carrying around.
Over those nine years, two traits became linked. Flower size and flowering time started moving together instead of separately.
Both of those traits are answers to real problems. Bigger flowers get found — and pollinators have been in steep decline, pushed down by pesticides, herbicides and how modern farmland is worked. When there are fewer pollinators, being conspicuous stops being a luxury and becomes survival. Meanwhile, a warming climate asks a plant to shift when it flowers, usually earlier, so that blooming still lines up with the season it evolved for.
Neither of those is a mistake. Big flowers are not vanity. Early flowering is not virtue. They are two sensible answers to two genuine pressures.
The trouble is that they became the same answer.
Once flower size and flowering time are genetically tied together, selection can no longer act on them separately. As Baucom put it, “Because pollinator pressure strongly favors larger flowers, that linkage may limit how efficiently the population can respond to other selective pressures.” Push hard on the flower size, and the timing gets dragged along whether that serves the plant or not.
Nothing chose this. That is worth saying plainly, because every word available to describe it — chose, traded, prioritised — smuggles in an intention that no plant has. There was no decision. There was pressure, and genetics, and nine years.
What Morning Glories Are Telling Us About Climate Change
It is worth being precise about the size of this claim, because it would be easy to stretch it.
This is one species, in one set of wild populations, over one nine-year window. It measures a rate of adaptation, not a countdown to extinction. Nobody involved is saying morning glories are doomed — the common morning glory is a hardy agricultural weed, and the study explicitly does not show whether adapting more slowly will make it easier or harder for farmers to manage.
What the work does point at is a growing gap between what evolutionary theory predicts and what biologists are actually finding in fields. Theory says populations under pressure should adapt. Bishop’s blunter observation was that “instead of evolving, there are all these wild populations that are dying off.”
That gap is not fully understood yet. Honest science leaves it open, and this study leaves it open. What it adds is a possible reason: not that the fuel runs out, but that a population can get committed to a direction while the ground shifts underneath it. The University of Michigan’s summary of the research lays out the full method if you want it.
Being Noticed and Being Ready Are Not the Same Thing
You can feel why this study travelled beyond botany.
Because the shape of it is familiar. Not the plant’s fault, not the plant’s choice, and yet unmistakably the shape of something: a life organised, sincerely and for good reasons, around being seen — and quietly losing the ability to move in any other direction.
Nobody gets there by being shallow. That is the part people get wrong. The morning glory is not vain. It is responding correctly to a genuine crisis in its world. Most people who end up over-optimised for visibility got there the same way — by responding correctly to real pressure, over and over, until the responses fused into a single direction they can no longer separate.
And the measurements all look fine from inside. The flowers are big. The plant is thriving on the axis it is being measured on. That is what makes it hard to catch. It is also why trying to simply stop comparing yourself to other people rarely works — the measuring is not the problem, the welding is.
There is an old idea, far older than any of this research, that the part of a life which actually holds weight is the part nobody is watching. The root rather than the bloom. The quiet work with no audience at all. It runs through nearly every ancient wisdom tradition, and it is put most plainly in the one that says God looks at what is underneath rather than at what is on display. Which is a strange sort of relief, when you sit with it — it means the size of the flower was never the measurement in the first place.
If you have never actually named what you are growing toward, it is a surprisingly hard question to answer cold. Our free core values assessment is one way in — not because a quiz can tell you who you are, but because it makes you notice which direction you are already committed to.
The morning glories will keep opening. Tomorrow before dawn, on some fence at the edge of a field, the same trumpet flowers will unfurl, bigger than their grandparents’ were, dew on the leaves, doing precisely what nine years of pressure shaped them to do.
They have no way to notice. You do. And that is the whole difference — you get to ask the question a morning glory never could.
What am I actually growing toward?
Questions People Ask About This Study
What did the morning glory study actually find?
A study published in Evolution Letters in 2026 found that a population of common morning glories (Ipomoea purpurea) had its rate of adaptation fall by about 96 percent over nine years. The population went from adapting at roughly 76 percent of the theoretically expected rate to roughly 9 percent. Researchers attribute this to flower size and flowering time becoming genetically linked, so that strong selection for larger, more pollinator-attracting flowers constrained the population’s ability to shift its flowering time in response to a warming climate.
Does a 96 percent drop in adaptation mean morning glories are going extinct?
No. The figure describes a decline in the rate of adaptation, not a prediction of extinction. The common morning glory is a widespread and hardy agricultural weed, and the researchers explicitly stated that their findings do not show whether slower adaptation will make the plant easier or harder for farmers to manage. The study also found that genetic variation was retained — the population has not run out of raw material for evolution.
What is a resurrection experiment?
A resurrection experiment is a research method in which seeds collected from the same wild population at different points in time are grown together under identical conditions. Because the environment is the same for every plant, any difference in traits between the older and newer seeds reflects genuine evolutionary change in the population rather than a short-term response to weather or soil. In this study, seeds were collected nine years apart.
Why would attracting pollinators stop a plant from adapting to climate change?
Pollinator populations have declined steeply due to pesticides, herbicides and modern agricultural practices, which puts strong selective pressure on plants to grow larger, more visible flowers. A warming climate simultaneously pressures plants to shift when they flower. In this morning glory population, flower size and flowering time became genetically correlated, meaning selection on one trait dragged the other along. The population could no longer respond to the two pressures independently.
Who conducted the morning glory climate change research?
The study was led by Sasha Bishop, a recent doctoral graduate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, and co-led by University of Michigan professor Regina Baucom, in collaboration with John Stinchcombe of the University of Toronto. It was published in the journal Evolution Letters in 2026.
What Do You Think?
A morning glory has no way of knowing it has become locked into one direction — every measurement it can take says it is doing well. Do you think people are any better at spotting it in themselves, or do most of us only see it looking backwards, years later? Tell us where you land in the comments — we genuinely want to know.
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- Morning glories spent nine years getting better at being noticed. Their rate of adapting to the climate fell 96%. The wild part: they didn’t run out of evolutionary fuel — they got locked into one direction. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-and-science/morning-glories-climate-change-adaptation/
- “The plant isn’t running out of evolutionary fuel — it’s increasingly locked into a trajectory.” A scientist said that about a flower and I have not stopped thinking about it since. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-and-science/morning-glories-climate-change-adaptation/
- Two good traits got genetically wired together in a morning glory population, and after that the plant couldn’t move one without dragging the other. Nine years. That’s all it took. Best thing I’ve read this week: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bible-resources/bible-and-science/morning-glories-climate-change-adaptation/
