The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

by Zoë Schlanger

Natasha Myers, an anthropologist of science at York University, and Carla Hustak, who studies the history of science at the University of Toronto, offer a different way of seeing the relationship between orchid and wasp. The orchid and insect bodies, as even Charles Darwin noticed in 1862, were exactly articulated to one another, the most perfect adaptation in nature. But he still saw it as essentially deceptive; since the insect was not getting any reproductive advantage from the encounter, the orchid must be deceiving it. But, ask Myers and Hustak, could this be something else? Perhaps something other than Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest mechanics? They suggest a sort of flirtation between insect and orchid, an interspecies dance in which both parties consent to the arrangement and move toward it with pleasure. Perhaps these encounters could be proof of a different sort of ecological arrangement, where “pleasure, play, or improvisation within or among species” is the norm.