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May 8 - May 16, 2025
flux. The moth that pollinates the flower of a plant is the same species that devours the plants’ leaves when it is still a caterpillar.
So after a while the besieged plant, having already lost some limbs and therefore showing tremendous restraint, judiciously begins to fill its leaves with unappetizing chemicals. At least most of the caterpillars will have eaten enough to survive, metamorphose, pollinate. Everyone in this situation comes within a hair of death to ultimately flourish. This is the push and pull of interdependence and competition. At the grand scale, no one seems to have yet won. All parties are still here, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. What we end up with is a sort of balance in constant motion. All of this
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To be precise, it takes six molecules of carbon dioxide and six molecules of water, torn apart by power from the sun, to form six molecules of oxygen and—the true aim of this whole process—one precious molecule of glucose. The plant uses the glucose to build new leaves, which will be used to make more glucose. It also shuttles the glucose down through its body, passing it into its underground architecture, where it is used to grow more roots, which will pull more water back up through its body, which will be torn apart to make more glucose.
Climbing vines are known to circle the air as seedlings, looking for an upright staff to climb—and seem to locate the position of an appropriate climbing surface long before actually coming into contact with it.
Coercion in particular is difficult to determine in a biological system. Who’s to say the other party is being coerced and not willingly playing along? What looks like coercion to us can have other connotations for the individuals involved.
more than thirty years studying the ways several groups of orchids convinced wasps to try to have sex with them. The point of this was to coat the wasps in their pollen. Which is to say, in order to have plant sex, the plant pantomimed wasp sex, and the wasp unwittingly had plant sex.
Karl Popper, the philosopher of science: “For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance.”
“I think consciousness is a very basic phenomenon which started with the first cell,”
Crop science is typically seen as the domestication of scrawny wild species to turn them into plump, useful food machines, a testament to human will and ingenuity. But Baluška objects to it being true “domestication” at all. “Domestication would be when one partner has more influence than the other one. But there is no evidence for this,” he says. “A better word would be coevolution. We are changing them, but they are changing us.”
“I think the plants are primary organisms, and we are the secondary ones. We are fully dependent on them. Without them, we would not be able to survive,” Baluška says. “The opposite situation would not be so drastic for them.”
One species of Australian termite is known to have a protist in its gut that in turn carries around four types of bacteria of its own.
The way the “self” is described in Vipassana, a form of Buddhist meditation, is as a collection of tiny, quivering units. Some call them atoms. At the root, though, is the idea that we are not ourselves—rather, we are only the sum of a bunch of individual flecks that happen to be humming along in the shape of a person.
“People and other eukaryotes are like solids frozen in a specific genetic mold,”
Complex sociality is, I believe, a type of intelligence of its own, a type of collective intelligence.
Hamilton’s rule states that you will behave preferentially toward your family members, so long as the cost to your own well-being doesn’t exceed the benefit to your shared genetic line.
carnivorous plants, for example, were recently discovered to have evolved to hunt in packs.
add some references, Please!
...oh wait. nevermind. They're at the end of the book.
carnivorous plants... have evolved to hunt in packs: Kazuki Tagawa and Mikio Watanabe, “Group Foraging in Carnivorous Plants: Carnivorous Plant Drosera makinoi (Droseraceae) Is More Effective at Trapping Larger Prey in Large Groups,” Plant Species Biology 36, no. 1 (2021): 114–18.
To develop cultivars in crop breeding, farmers select for the most “vigorous”-looking individual plants in a field. But these are actually the most competitive individuals. The plants with more altruistic tendencies will be more reserved, in that they will tend not to grow aggressively into their neighbor’s sun space. So it seems the history of crop breeding has actually helped to reduce altruism, to its own peril, writes Dudley.
Each root tip acts as both a gatherer and a sensor, integrating information about the rhizosphere into the whole root system, causing the architecture of the plant’s root network to morph and shift shape, like a murmur of starlings or a school of minnows.
isn't it easier to think of simple neighbour relational functions that then cause effects in the whole? like a murmur of starlings or a school of minnows
And in a harsh and variable landscape, the best spot is the one already proven to be fertile; the parent has already managed to grow there.
For example, if yellow monkey flowers are exposed to predators, they will produce babies with a quiver of defensive spikes on their leaves. Wild radishes that have lived through a scourge of destructive caterpillars will make baby radishes with extra-bristly leaves too, plus they’ll be preloaded with defensive chemicals to better ward off threats. If these plant-children end up facing the same challenges their parents did, they’ll be much better prepared to handle them.
The environment appears to flow through organisms, altering them at the deepest level. In a 2015 book, Sultan wrote that this makes it hard to even consider the two as fully separate entities: “On closer examination, however, the environment extends into the organism and the organism into its environment, in ways that obscure the boundary between them.”
emerald green sea slug.
We create a collective “myth” of ourselves and the world, he writes, which reflects our present norms, and is enshrined in our laws. But we tend to forget that these norms are fabrications.
“We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm—a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.” Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 1868.
In fact, across a large mycelial mat connected to many plants, Toby Kiers, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and her colleagues found that fungi could use a strategy of “buy low, sell high,” by moving phosphorus from places of abundance to places of scarcity, where it will fetch a higher price. See Matthew D. Whiteside et al., “Mycorrhizal Fungi Respond to Resource Inequality by Moving Phosphorus from Rich to Poor Patches across Networks,” Current Biology 29, no. 12 (June 2019): R570–72.
