How Might Highly Resilient Plant Immunity Have Evolved? A “multiverse” Hypothesis

Flowering plants have highly resilient core immunity, which is likely key to withstanding assaults from fast-evolving pathogens for millions of years. A major means of enabling resilience is acquisition of backup immune signaling mechanisms, which effectively conceal evolutionary goals from pathogens. However, it seems impossible to acquire backup mechanisms via incremental adaptation under constant pressure from faster-evolving organisms. Here I propose a hypothesis for how a system with backup mechanisms could have evolved using concepts borrowed from a multiverse hypothesis in cosmology.