IMMIGRATION AND DISPERSAL OF THE SCANDINAVIAN FLORA 231 



Attempts have been made to elucidate the problem of Pleistocene survival by 

 cytogenetic investigations. Unfortunately, the results are far from being 

 unambiguous. Favarger has recently (1960) pointed out that polyploidy may 

 indicate both youth and great age in a taxon, and moreover these terms are 

 relative only, and cannot be adequately translated into geologic or absolute 

 chronology. As long as we know nothing about the speed of evolution, 

 cytogenetic data cannot contribute very much, nor can the presence or 

 absence of endemic taxa. We should not forget that terms like "old" and 

 "young" refer to a very local time-scale only, in biology each taxon has its 

 own time-scale, and we have no possibility for translating these into terms of 

 each other. To use a word like "young" derived from a biologic time-scale in 

 a geologic argument is not admissible. 



The current situation is extremely unsatisfactory. The present-day distribu- 

 tion pattern of the Scandinavian mountain flora has been referred to ecologic 

 and to historical reasons: Ice Age survival has been referred to marginal 

 areas in the east, south and west of the ice sheet, and, in addition, to the 

 coastal refugia as well as to nunataks. None of the ideas has been properly 

 proved, none of them definitely disproved. Biologists have a problem and an 

 attempt at an explanation. Geologists refuse to accept the explanation and 

 cannot offer any solution to the problem. And no new argument has been 

 presented in this tug-of-war, only new versions of the old ones. 



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