A prayer and a life jacket are just about all there is to rely on when a torpedoed seaman takes the big jump from his sinking ship. Kapok—the silky, white, feather-soft down from the pods of the kapok ...

Celebrated in Buddhist temples and cultivated for its wood and cottony fibers, the kapok tree now is upsetting an idea that biologists have clung to for decades: the notion that African and South ...