I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Giving plants mobility is just part of the process of getting a small tool to Titan.
ReplyDeleteI dunno Gene, this sounds very "meme-ish" to me... :) Shoot, I can't remember how it goes, something like, "A human is a library's way of building another library" or something.
ReplyDeleteI forgot Kurt was there first.
ReplyDeleteGene, while we help propagate plants deliberately, plants long ago developed ways to use insects and animals to propagate themselves - as parts of the fertilization and seed propagation processes. That`s why plants have fruits, for example.
ReplyDeleteYou might also be aware that certain ants (leaf cutters) raise various types of fungi - which does involve carrying the fungus around whenever a new nest in established.
So far, my thesis is cool -- I was referring to the grown plants, not seeds, and fungi ain't plants!
ReplyDeleteIf your thesis is narrowed from offering plant mobility to the uprooting and replanting of mature plants, then it bears up remarkably well.
ReplyDeleteThe only problem is that very few people actually do any transplanting of mature plants, leaving them sadly without any meaning for their lives.