A season of sexual frenzy

By -
Once we recognize that plants are much, much more active than they appear to be to casual observation, possessing memories, communicating with other plants, sharing resources, driving off predators, and so on, it is clear to me that there is no reason to regard them as less sentient than animals. Animals simply move at our speed (we being animals!), while the activity of plants is slower and thus much less apparent to us. (Tolkein, for one, saw this, characterizing Ent speech as being extremely slow moving compared to other Middle Earth creatures with language.)

And recognizing that, spring suddenly looks a lot different: it is an explosion of sexual activity, with, say, the trees in our yards having week-long orgasms. We just got a new car, and after we left it parked on the street for two days, I went to start it only to find it coated with a thick layer of pollen. "Ugh," I thought, "that tree has just ejaculated all over my car!"

Comments

  1. Olivier Braun2:26 AM

    Speaking of Ents, I just came back from an expedition in Cameroon, the first crossing of the Dja reserve (North-south) by oursiders, and we saw a few Walking Trees. They move about 1 meter per year, seeking a better soil etc..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ken B4:54 AM

    Plants are deaf, but they can see color.
    You might enjoy the book What Plants Know.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 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...
Read more