Botany Subject Quotes

I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by any direct apologetic work…. We can make people often attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted…. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way around. Our faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defense of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.

The things that we describe so carefully are called phenomena — the second element in the definition. The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. As an example, take a cup of coffee. (Husserl liked coffee: long before Aron talked about the phenomenology of apricot cocktails, Husserl told students in his seminars, ‘Give me my coffee so that I can make phenomenology out of it.’) What, then, is a cup of coffee? I might define it in terms of its chemistry and the botany of the coffee plant, and add a summary of how its beans are grown and exported, how they are ground, how hot water is pressed through the powder and then poured into a shaped receptacle to be presented to a member of the human species who orally ingests it. I could analyse the effect of caffeine on the body, or discuss the international coffee trade. I could fill an encyclopaedia with these facts, and I would still get no closer to saying what this particular cup of coffee in front of me is. On the other hand, if I went the other way and conjured up a set of purely personal, sentimental associations — as Marcel Proust does when he dunks his madeleine in his tea and goes on to write seven volumes about it — that would not allow me to understand this cup of coffee as an immediately given phenomenon either. Instead, this cup of coffee is a rich aroma, at once earthy and perfumed; it is the lazy movement of a curlicue of steam rising from its surface. As I lift it to my lips, it is a placidly shifting liquid and a weight in my hand inside its thick-rimmed cup. It is an approaching warmth, then an intense dark flavour on my tongue, starting with a slightly austere jolt and then relaxing into a comforting warmth, which spreads from the cup into my body, bringing the promise of lasting alertness and refreshment. The promise, the anticipated sensations, the smell, the colour and the flavour are all part of the coffee as phenomenon. They all emerge by being experienced. If I treated all these as purely ‘subjective’ elements to be stripped away in order to be ‘objective’ about my coffee, I would find there was nothing left of my cup of coffee as a phenomenon — that is, as it appears in the experience of me, the coffee-drinker. This experiential cup of coffee is the one I can speak about with certainty, while everything else to do with the bean-growing and the chemistry is hearsay. It may all be interesting hearsay, but it’s irrelevant to a phenomenologist.

It would be easy to get the idea from all this that Mimosa is some kind of genius, a veritable Einstein among vegetables. But there's no evidence for this at all. The reason all this work has focused on Mimosa is simply that its ability to move (and fast) makes it a convenient experimental subject, which in turn reveals just what a hasty bunch we are; other plants may well be smarter than Mimosa, but until very recently biologists had generally decided that it would take too long to find out.

Misha’s and my mission to spend a year on ISS is unprecedented. A normal mission to the space station lasts five to six months, so scientists have a good deal of data about what happens to the human body in space for that length of time. But very little is known about what happens after month six. The symptoms might get precipitously worse in the ninth month, for instance, or they might level off. We don’t know, and there is only one way to find out. Misha and I will collect various types of data for studies on ourselves, which will take a significant amount of our time. Because Mark and I are identical twins, I’m also taking part in an extensive study comparing the two of us throughout the year, down to the genetic level. The International Space Station is a world-class orbiting laboratory, and in addition to the human studies of which I am one of the main subjects, I will also spend a lot of my time this year working on other experiments, like fluid physics, botany, combustion, and Earth observation. When I talk about the International Space Station to audiences, I always share with them the importance of the science being done there. But to me, it’s just as important that the station is serving as a foothold for our species in space. From there, we can learn more about how to push out farther into the cosmos. The costs are high, as are the risks.

Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.

We divide the world into subjects and objects, and here in the garden, as in nature generally, we humans are the subjects.

Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees. •

Living things have always had to make their way in a wild garden of flowers and vines, of leaves and trees and fungi that hold out not only nourishing things to eat but deadly poisons, too. Nothing is more important to a creature’s survival than knowing which is which, yet drawing a bright line through the middle of the garden, as the God of Genesis found, doesn’t always work. The difficulty is that there are plants that do other, more curious things than simply sustain or extinguish life. Some heal; others rouse or calm or quiet the body’s pain. But most remarkable of all, there are plants in the garden that manufacture molecules with the power to change the subjective experience of reality we call consciousness.

Sometimes shows became almost obsessively obscure, as with the gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa) shows of nineteenth-century Britain, when workingmen in the industrial counties of northern England and the Midlands formed themselves into societies, constituted with presidents, secretaries, and stewards, for the purpose of running gooseberry shows—weight being the decisive factor. Quite why this fruit, always something of a minority taste, should become the subject of what only could be described as a cult remains a mystery.