Plant Reproduction Quotes

People were so naive about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction---and defense.

Creation at this time, peopled as it was by primal deities whose whole energy and purpose seems to have been directed towards reproduction, was endowed with an astonishing fertility. The soil was blessed with such a fecund richness that one could almost believe that if you planted a pencil it would burst into flower.

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.

There are botany textbooks that contain pages and pages of growth curves, but it is always the lazy-S-shaped ones that confuse my students the most. Why would a plant decrease in mass just when it is nearing its plateau of maximum productivity? I remind them that this shrinking has proved to be a signal of reproduction. As the green plants reach maturity, some of their nutrients are pulled back and repurposed toward flowers and seeds. Production of the new generation comes at a significant cost to the parent, and you can see it in a cornfield, even from a great distance.

Many amateurs believe that plants and animals reproduce on a one-way route toward perfection. Translating the idea in social terms, they believe that companies and organizations are, thanks to competition (and the discipline of the quarterly report), irreversibly heading toward betterment. The strongest will survive; the weakest will become extinct. As to investors and traders, they believe that by letting them compete, the best will prosper and the worst will go learn a new craft (like pumping gas or, sometimes, dentistry). Things are not as simple as that. We will ignore the basic misuse of Darwinian ideas in the fact that organizations do not reproduce like living members of nature—Darwinian ideas are about reproductive fitness, not about survival.

According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort.

Unlike the clonal longevity of asexual organisms, sexually reproduced plants and animals usually have briefer, individual life cycles. In short, the enormous diversity afforded by the evolutionary invention of sexual reproduction came with a price—death of the individual.

People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals—discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds.

In complex organisms the head, or anterior pole of the body, is the part that processes information, the posterior pole the part that engages in sexual reproduction and excretion of waste. From that orientation plants live with their heads in the Earth, their asses in the air. We love the smell, usually, of their reproductive organs and pick them to give to our beloveds (a highly suggestive though unconscious act). We don’t, most of us, really know plants at all.

Number 99 was an eviscerated ceramics plant. During the war a succession of blazing explosions had burst among the stock of thousands of chemical glazes, fused them, and splashed them into a wild rainbow reproduction of a lunar crater. Great splotches of magenta, violet, bice green, burnt umber, and chrome yellow were burned into the stone walls. Long streams of orange, crimson, and imperial purple had erupted through windows and doors to streak the streets and surrounding ruins with slashing brush strokes. This became the Rainbow House of Chooka Frood.

Everything that flows moves in rhythm with the moon. She rules the water element on Earth. She pulls the ocean’s tides, the weather, female reproductive cycles and the life fluids of plants, animals and people. She influences the mood swings of mind, body, behavior and emotion. WeMoon Diary

Because, let’s face it, genitalia—all genitalia, no matter the animal—range from distressing to disturbing to horrifying. Human vaginas look like sea creatures that slurp their food—and probably regurgitate half of it—and penises are startling, no matter the situation. If someone made a horror movie entitled, Dick Pics and just showed various dick pics? It would be the scariest, most distressing movie ever made. The only species that does reproductive systems visually right are angiosperms (flowering plants). When you’re smelling a flower, you’re basically smelling a dick. Let that sink in.

Strange, Eliot thinks, that the androids take to religion. After all they aren’t plagued by the unknowns that draw heartbeats to temples, bibles, and holy men. There is no mystery as to who created the bots, no absence of meaning for their existence as there is with men. If a bot wants to know why he was put here, all he has to do is ask. The engineers who created them, men like Eliot’s father, could tell them, yes, I know exactly why you’re here. You’re here to shovel, to mine, to gather, to build, to plant, to harvest, to fish, to sew, to stitch, to mend, to weld, to solder, to cook, to slaughter, to render, to load, to carry, to steer, to fight, to clean – to serve.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals—discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds. It was a complex, dynamic process which she never ceased to find fascinating. And which she knew most people simply didn’t understand. But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.

Richard Lewontin observes . . . In Cladocera, small fresh-water arthropods, reproduction remains asexual as long as conditions of temperature, oxygen dissolved in the water, food availability, and degree of crowding remain constant. Then, if a sudden change in these conditions occurs . . . the Cladocera switch to sexual reproduction. . . . The organisms are detecting a rate of change of an input, not its absolute value. They are performing mathematical differentiation.22

Linnaeus’s other striking quality was an abiding — at times, one might say, a feverish — preoccupation with sex. He was particularly struck by the similarity between certain bivalves and the female pudenda. To the parts of one species of clam he gave the names vulva, labia, pubes, anus, and hymen. He grouped plants by the nature of their reproductive organs and endowed them with an arrestingly anthropomorphic amorousness. His descriptions of flowers and their behavior are full of references to “promiscuous intercourse,” “barren concubines,” and “the bridal bed.

Nature as a means of reproduction is important for these intellectual workers because the specialisation and one-sidedness of their work generates psychological instability and requires periods of complete relaxation without jarring sensorial stimuli (noise, media, social contacts). Nature is the most efficient compensation for intellectual stress since it represents the unity of body and mind against the capitalist division of labour. Extensive consumption of nature has traditionally been an element of the re-production of intellectual workers. (It started with Rousseau, then came the Romantics, Thoreau, the early tourists, Tolstoi, artists’ colonies in the Alps, etc). The ecological movement responds directly to the class interests of the intellectual sector of the proletariat and the struggle against nuclear power plants is a mere extension of this struggle.

The world’s most celebrated religions teach people that the world around us, our environment, is sacred. A diet rooted in anymal products is exponentially more harmful to the earth than is a plant-based diet. Seventy percent more land must be cultivated in order to raise anymals for food than would be necessary for a vegan diet. This means that 70 percent more land is taken away from natural ecosystems to produce flesh, nursing milk, and bird’s reproductive eggs for consumption, and this land that is necessary for a diet rich in anymal products will be sprayed with pesticides and earth-damaging fertilizers. These additional crops—70 percent more—also need to be irrigated, using exponentially more water. Anymals exploited by food industries also drink millions of gallons of water and drop millions of tons of manure. Finally, raising animals for flesh contributes significantly to carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, and methane—global climate change.

Viruses, for instance, perform a really irritating function of intermingling the DNA from every species on Earth with every other. As Richard Lewontin puts it . . . It used to be thought that new functions had to arise by mutations of the genes already possessed by a species and that the only way such mutations could spread was by the normal processes of reproduction. It is now clear that genetic material has moved during evolution from species to species by means of retroviruses and other transposable particles. . . . What is so extraordinary in its implications for evolution is that transposition can occur between forms of life that are quite different, between distantly related vertebrates, for example, or even between plants and bacteria. . . . Thus, the assumption that species are on independent evolutionary pathways, once they have diverged from each other and can no longer interbreed, is incorrect. All life-forms are in potential genetic contact and genetic exchanges between them are going on. . . . The evolutionary “tree of life” seems the wrong metaphor. Perhaps we should think of it as an elaborate bit of macramé.16

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Many kinds of animal behavior can be explained by genetic similarity theory. Animals have a preference for close kin, and study after study has shown that they have a remarkable ability to tell kin from strangers. Frogs lay eggs in bunches, but they can be separated and left to hatch individually. When tadpoles are then put into a tank, brothers and sisters somehow recognize each other and cluster together rather than mix with tadpoles from different mothers. Female Belding’s ground squirrels may mate with more than one male before they give birth, so a litter can be a mix of full siblings and half siblings. Like tadpoles, they can tell each other apart. Full siblings cooperate more with each other than with half-siblings, fight less, and are less likely to run each other out of the territory when they grow up. Even bees know who their relatives are. In one experiment, bees were bred for 14 different degrees of relatedness—sisters, cousins, second cousins, etc.—to bees in a particular hive. When the bees were then released near the hive, guard bees had to decide which ones to let in. They distinguished between degrees of kinship with almost perfect accuracy, letting in the closest relatives and chasing away more distant kin. The correlation between relatedness and likelihood of being admitted was a remarkable 0.93. Ants are famous for cooperation and willingness to sacrifice for the colony. This is due to a quirk in ant reproduction that means worker ants are 70 percent genetically identical to each other. But even among ants, there can be greater or less genetic diversity, and the most closely related groups of ants appear to cooperate best. Linepithema humile is a tiny ant that originated in Argentina but migrated to the United States. Many ants died during the trip, and the species lost much of its genetic diversity. This made the northern branch of Linepithema humile more cooperative than the one left in Argentina, where different colonies quarrel and compete with each other. This new level of cooperation has helped the invaders link nests into supercolonies and overwhelm local species of ants. American entomologists want to protect American ants by introducing genetic diversity so as to make the newcomers more quarrelsome. Even plants cooperate with close kin and compete with strangers. Normally, when two plants are put in the same pot, they grow bigger root systems, trying to crowd each other out and get the most nutrients. A wild flower called the Sea Rocket, which grows on beaches, does not do that if the two plants come from the same “mother” plant. They recognize each others’ root secretions and avoid wasteful competition.

Beyond a fence, they came to the swimming pool, which spilled over into a series of waterfalls and smaller rocky pools. The area was planted with huge ferns. “Isn’t this extraordinary?” Ed Regis said. “Especially on a misty day, these plants really contribute to the prehistoric atmosphere. These are authentic Jurassic ferns, of course.” Ellie paused to look more closely at the ferns. Yes, it was just as he said: Serenna veriformans, a plant found abundantly in fossils more than two hundred million years old, now common only in the wetlands of Brazil and Colombia. But whoever had decided to place this particular fern at poolside obviously didn’t know that the spores of veriformans contained a deadly beta-carboline alkaloid. Even touching the attractive green fronds could make you sick, and if a child were to take a mouthful, he would almost certainly die—the toxin was fifty times more poisonous than oleander. People were so naïve about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction—and defense. But Ellie knew that, in the earth’s history, plants had evolved as competitively as animals, and in some ways more fiercely. The poison in Serenna veriformans was a minor example of the elaborate chemical arsenal of weapons that plants had evolved. There were terpenes, which plants spread to poison the soil around them and inhibit competitors; alkaloids, which made them unpalatable to insects and predators (and children); and pheromones, used for communication. When a Douglas fir tree was attacked by beetles, it produced an anti-feedant chemical—and so did other Douglas firs in distant parts of the forest. It happened in response to a warning alleochemical secreted by the trees that were under attack. People who imagined that life on earth consisted of animals moving against a green background seriously misunderstood what they were seeing. That green background was busily alive. Plants grew, moved, twisted, and turned, fighting for the sun; and they interacted continuously with animals—discouraging some with bark and thorns; poisoning others; and feeding still others to advance their own reproduction, to spread their pollen and seeds. It was a complex, dynamic process which she never ceased to find fascinating. And which she knew most people simply didn’t understand. But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.

cell, for example, has about 2 m of DNA—a length about 250,000 times greater than the cell’s diameter. Yet before the cell can divide to form genetically identical daughter cells, all of this DNA must be copied, or replicated, and then the two copies must be separated so that each daughter cell ends up with a complete genome. The replication and distribution of so much DNA is manageable because the DNA molecules are packaged into structures called chromosomes, so named because they take up certain dyes used in microscopy (from the Greek chroma, color, and soma, body) (Figure 12.3). Each eukaryotic chromosome consists of one very long, linear DNA molecule associated with many proteins (see Figure 6.9). The DNA molecule carries several hundred to a few thousand genes, the units of information that specify an organism’s inherited traits. The associated proteins maintain the structure of the chromosome and help control the activity of the genes. Together, the entire complex of DNA and proteins that is the building material of chromosomes is referred to as chromatin. As you will soon see, the chromatin of a chromosome varies in its degree of condensation during the process of cell division. Every eukaryotic species has a characteristic number of chromosomes in each cell nucleus. For example, the nuclei of human somatic cells (all body cells except the reproductive cells) each contain 46 chromosomes, made up of two sets of 23, one set inherited from each parent. Reproductive cells, or gametes—sperm and eggs—have half as many chromosomes as somatic cells, or one set of 23 chromosomes in humans. The Figure 12.4 A highly condensed, duplicated human chromosome (SEM). Circle one sister chromatid of the chromosome in this micrograph. DRAW IT Sister chromatids Centromere 0.5μm number of chromosomes in somatic cells varies widely among species: 18 in cabbage plants, 48 in chimpanzees, 56 in elephants, 90 in hedgehogs, and 148 in one species of alga. We’ll now consider how these chromosomes behave during cell division. Distribution of Chromosomes During Eukaryotic Cell Division When a cell is not dividing, and even as it replicates its DNA in preparation for cell division, each chromosome is in the form of a long, thin chromatin fiber. After DNA replication, however, the chromosomes condense as a part of cell division: Each chromatin fiber becomes densely coiled and folded, making the chromosomes much shorter and so thick that we can see them with a light microscope. Each duplicated chromosome has two sister chromatids, which are joined copies of the original chromosome (Figure 12.4). The two chromatids, each containing an identical DNA molecule, are initially attached all along their lengths by protein complexes called cohesins; this attachment is known as sister chromatid cohesion. Each sister chromatid has a centromere, a region containing

matured satisfactorily in that climate. Some green foods were available in the summer and some vegetables were grown and stored for winter. This diet, which included a liberal supply of fish, included also the use of livers of fish. One important fish dish was baked cod's head that had been stuffed with oat meal and chopped cods' livers. This was an important inclusion in the diets of the growing children. The oats and fish, including livers, provided minerals and vitamins adequate for an excellent racial stock with high immunity to tooth decay. For the Eskimos of Alaska the native diet consisted of a liberal use of organs and other special tissues of the large animal life of the sea, as well as of fish. The latter were dried in large quantities in the summer and stored for winter use. The fish were also eaten frozen. Seal oil was used freely as an adjunct to this diet and seal meat was specially prized and was usually available. Caribou meat was sometimes available. The organs were used. Their fruits were limited largely to a few berries including cranberries, available in the summer and stored for winter use. Several plant foods were gathered in the summer and stored in fat or frozen for winter use. A ground nut that was gathered by the Tundra mice and stored in caches was used by the Eskimos as a vegetable. Stems of certain water grasses, water plants and bulbs were occasionally used. The bulk of their diet, however, was fish and large animal life of the sea from which they selected certain organs and tissues with great care and wisdom. These included the inner layer of skin of one of the whale species, which has recently been shown to be very rich in vitamin C. Fish eggs were dried in season. They were used liberally as food for the growing children and were recognized as important for growth and reproduction. This successful nutrition provided ample amounts of fat-soluble activators and minerals from sea animal

there has been a dramatic decrease in birth and survival rates of caribou calves. It seems that rising temperatures have changed the growing patterns of plants that are the source of critical energy for caribou calves, as well as for their mothers during reproduction and lactation.

somehow humans—and only humans—have done something astonishing. We can transcend our limitations. We have developed science, technology, philosophy, literature, art, and law. We have come up with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; we’ve been to the moon. We use contraception, deliberately subverting nature’s goal of reproductive success so that we can pursue other goals. We give some of our resources (nowhere near enough, but some) to strangers, overcoming our biological drive to favor family and friends. We don’t marvel at this enough. It’s so odd that this could have ever happened, that minds that evolved to cope with a world of middle-size objects—plants and birds and rocks and things—could come to have some grasp of the origins of the universe, quantum forces, and the nature of time; that minds that evolved to feel kindly toward kin and to be grateful to those who treat us kindly could arrive at moral precepts that motivate charity for those far away. Some people think that all of this is a miracle, actually, and therefore proof of the existence of a loving God. I am skeptical myself,

The only species that does reproductive systems visually right are angiosperms (flowering plants). When you’re smelling a flower, you’re basically smelling a dick. Let that sink in.

For centuries, naturalists and philosophers have struggled to make sense of the range of life on Earth. One of the earliest and most pervasive ideas was that of a ‘Scale of Nature’ in which living, and sometimes non-living, things were arranged into a linear hierarchy. Each ascending rung on a ladder represented increasing ‘advancement’, based on a blend of anatomical complexity, religious significance, and practical usefulness. The idea had its origins in the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, but was crystallized by the work of the 18th-century Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet. In Bonnet’s scheme, the Scale of Nature rose from earth and metals, to stones and salts, and stepwise through fungi, plants, sea anemones, worms, insects, snails, reptiles, water serpents, fish, birds, and finally mammals, with man sitting comfortably on top. Or almost on top, being marginally trumped by angels and archangels. It is easy to ridicule such ideas today, but Bonnet had a good knowledge of the natural world. For example, it was Bonnet who discovered asexual reproduction in aphids and the way that butterflies and their caterpillars breathe. Furthermore, the idea of a Scale of Nature still pervades much modern writing, with many scientists talking of ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ animals: language that bears an uncanny resemblance to this old and discredited idea.

Done at a certain time, depriving plants of water places them under stress and sends them into survival mode; to increase their chance of reproduction they begin to produce as much seed as possible. The rice paddy was born out of these careful observations, and it became the most productive food system ever devised.

enhances the orchid’s reproductive success—but not his own! The best known of these cheats is the bee orchid—the flower looks and feels like a female bee and even has the same pheromones.

What, if not a death drive, would impel sexual beings towards a pre sexual form of reproduction (in the depths of our imagination, moreover, is it not precisely this scissiparous form of reproduction and proliferation based solely on contiguity that for us is death and the death drive?). And what, if not a death drive, would further impel us at the same time, on the metaphysical plane, to deny all otherness, to shun any alteration in the Same, and to seek nothing beyond the perpetuation of an identity, nothing but the transparency of a genetic inscription no longer subject even to the vicissitudes of procreation? But enough of the death drive. Are we faced here with a phantasy of selfgenesis? No, because such phantasies always involve the figures of the mother and the father - sexed parental figures whom the subject may indeed yearn to eliminate, the better to usurp their positions, but this in no sense implies contesting the symbolic structure of procreation: if you become your own child, you are still the child of someone. Cloning, on the other hand, radically eliminates not only the mother but also the father, for it eliminates the interaction between his genes and the mother's, the imbrication of the parents' differences, and above all the joint act of procreation. The cloner does not beget himself: he sprouts from each of his genes' segments. One may well speculate about the value of such plant-like shoots, which in effect resolve all Oedipal sexuality in favour of a 'non-human' sex, a sex based on contiguity and unmediated propagation. But at all events the phantasy of self-genesis is definitively out of the picture. Father and mother are gone, but their disappearance, far from widening an aleatory freedom for the subject, instead leaves the way clear for a matrix known as a code. No more mother, no more father: just a matrix. And it is this matrix, this genetic code, which is destined to 'give birth', from now till eternity, in an operational mode from which all chance sexual elements have been expunged.

1 an oval or round object laid by a female bird, reptile, fish, or invertebrate, usually containing a developing embryo. The eggs of birds are enclosed in a chalky shell, while those of reptiles are in a leathery membrane. an infertile bird's egg, especially one from a chicken, used for food. a thing resembling a bird's egg in shape: chocolate eggs. 2 [BIOLOGY] the female reproductive cell in animals and plants; an ovum. 3 [ARCHITECTURE] a decorative oval moulding, used alternately with triangular shapes: [as modifier] egg and dart moulding. 4 [with adj.] INFORMAL, DATED a person of a specified kind: the biography portrays him as a thoroughly bad egg. don't put all your eggs in one basket PROVERB don't risk everything on the success of one venture. go suck an egg [as imperative] NORTH AMERICAN INFORMAL used as an expression of anger or scorn. kill the goose that lays the golden eggs destroy a reliable and valuable source of income. [ with allusion to one of Aesop's fables.] lay an egg NORTH AMERICAN INFORMAL be completely unsuccessful. with egg on one's face INFORMAL appearing foolish or ridiculous: don't underestimate this team, or you'll be left with egg on your face. eggless adj. Middle English (superseding earlier ey, from Old English g): from Old Norse. egg2

complex organisms the head, or anterior pole of the body, is the part that processes information, the posterior pole the part that engages in sexual reproduction and excretion of waste. From that orientation plants live with their heads in the Earth, their asses in the air. We love the smell, usually, of their reproductive organs and pick them to give to our beloveds (a highly suggestive though unconscious act).

five steps in the evolution of sexuality: first, asexual reproduction (parthenogenesis); then, with plants, sexual difference is posited in itself, it is not yet fully actualized “for itself”); with mammals, sexual difference is posited “for itself,” fully actualized in two sexes; with humans, natural sexuality is no longer just biological but redoubled as a fact of the symbolic order, which allows for its instability (a biological man can be a woman in its symbolic identity, etc.); finally, with the prospect of posthumanity, both levels disintegrate: the scientifically engineered asexual reproduction cancels sexuality, which is also threatened by the prospect of asexual symbolic identifications (but will such identifications still be symbolic?). Notes

five steps in the evolution of sexuality: first, asexual reproduction (parthenogenesis); then, with plants, sexual difference is posited in itself, it is not yet fully actualized “for itself”); with mammals, sexual difference is posited “for itself,” fully actualized in two sexes; with humans, natural sexuality is no longer just biological but redoubled as a fact of the symbolic order, which allows for its instability (a biological man can be a woman in its symbolic identity, etc.); finally, with the prospect of posthumanity, both levels disintegrate: the scientifically engineered asexual reproduction cancels sexuality, which is also threatened by the prospect of asexual symbolic identifications (but will such identifications still be symbolic?).

There is something decidedly queer in all of this—the orchids and aspens and strawberries and antplants and ginkgoes—a sense of sensual entanglement that disregards binaries, runs across the species boundary, and almost gleefully defies heteronormative modes of reproduction. This lens might also help us escape the idea that everything in nature is a battle, with a clear winner. Sometimes it may be an improvisation, or a collaboration, or something else entirely. WHEN

Crops are typically grown in cultivars, or variations on a single species, bred with some specific trait in mind. Within a single cultivar, the plants tend to be genetically similar, though not identical. But individual altruistic tendencies may be more clearly distinguishable among them. 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. If a farmer were to instead select altruistic plants early in the breeding process, it could steer the crop toward allocating fewer resources into competing for space, therefore presumably putting more energy into reproduction—that is, the development of the fruit the crop is prized for. On the flip side, aggressive plants are useful when the aggression is directed to plants outside the cultivar—non-kin plants, including weeds. Choosing the plants adept at helping their neighbors but fighting off intruders might ultimately result in a highly resilient cultivar. In this way, paying attention to individual plants’ social traits—might we say personalities?—could have a real benefit to the way we grow food.

Vegetarian protein is found chiefly in the seed. The seed is the reproductive part of the plant. To be able to reproduce itself the seed must  contain all the essential amino acids or life could not come out of the seed.

But if you think about it, all that is beautiful in life is inextricably bound to sex. What is a flower but a device to consummate the union of the male and female parts of a plant? What is a butterfly but a go-between that unites flowers in love? What is birdsong but a call to its mate? What is the display of feathers by the peacock but a mating rite? What is a nubile woman or a virile man but an outpouring of sexuality? All that is strong and bursting with youth and vitality, all colour and song and grace, all the loveliness of nature, the spring and its rhapsody, are expressions of nature's unrelenting reproductive impulse.

The third commandment forbade monks from committing any act that might favor, directly or indirectly, the reproduction of living beings, animals, or plants. Thus, if cutting down a tree contravened the second commandment, planting one was an infraction of the third: "He who has planted a [fruit-yielding tree] shall pass through several bodies until the [tree] has been felled:' The theological reason for this was Simple: to encourage reproduction was to endlessly retard the process by which the particles of light trapped in the bodies of living things were finally and permanently liberated.

The depth psychologist C.G. Jung, himself deeply influenced by Augustine, divided life into two halves (see Figure 6.2, Jung’s Stages of Life). He argued that we live the first half of life on the sheer energy of being youthful biological organisms. The tasks of this stage of life are dominated by the biological need for the reproduction of the species and the social need to reproduce the collective wisdom of one’s culture through education. Then, somewhere around the middle of life,it finally hits you one day that half your life is over, that your youth is past and that time is slipping away from you. In your youth it seemed as if you had all the time in the world and as if you could do anything. Now you come to face the fact that time is running out and there are some things you will never accomplish. Mid-life is the point at which we reach the apex of the biological curve of life, that turning point where youth gives way to the inevitable processes of aging, sickness, and death. This is the life cycle of all living things, plant, animal or human.Inthe case of humans, however, we are conscious of our mortality, an awareness that sends us on a quest, seeking for a personal answer to the problem of death as a loss of self as the second half of our life looms before us. As

Each grain of pollen may be likened to a sort of box. Inside are the plant's reproductive cells. It is essential for these cells to be well concealed to protect their life and keep them safe from external dangers. For this reason the structure of the box is very strong. The box is surrounded by a wall called the "sporoderm." The outermost layer of this wall, called exine, is the most resistant material known in the organic world, and its chemical make-up has not yet been fully analysed. This material is generally very resistant to damage from acids or enzymes. It is f u r t h e r m o re unaffected by high temperature and pre s s u re. As we have seen, very detailed precautions have been taken to protect the pollen, which is essential for the continued existence of plants. The grains have been very specially wrapped up. Thanks to this, whatever method the pollen is dispersed by, it can remain alive even miles away from the p a rent plant. Besides the fact that pollen grains are coated with a very resistant material, they are also dispersed in very large numbers, which guarantees the multiplication of that plant.

I could make a strong, if not conclusive, case for the idea that plants are more intelligent than people—more beautiful, more pacific, more ingenious in their ways of reproduction, more at home in their surroundings, and even more sensitive. Why, we even use flower-forms as our symbols of the divine when the human face reminds us too much of ourselves—the Hindu-Buddhist mandala, the golden lotus, and the Mystic Rose in Dante’s vision of Paradise. Nothing else reminds us so much of a star with a living heart.

The two keys for keeping all that energy in rainforests are branching and connecting. Plants literally branch, and animals figuratively do it with reproduction and species variation, and then it all interacts. There’s cooperation. There’s competition. There’s co-creation. That’s life.

In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods---strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes---that had the durability to survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today. If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it'll produce perfectly identical apples. Millenia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out. Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which had all the qualities of a farmer's dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.

But your genes can also be different from those of your parents just through random mutation, which is the imperfect copying from one strand of DNA to another. It can literally be a cosmic ray from outer space that knocks into one of your genes and changes it. Genes sometimes jump from one place on the DNA molecule to another. These are called transposon genes. It could be that your parent’s eggs or sperm (or a plant’s ova and pollen) got messed with a little by some chemical. It could be radiation from some radioactive elements in Earth’s crust that caused a mutation. Sometimes viruses get into the reproductive cells of an organism and modify its genes. Virus manipulation can also be exploited deliberately—to adjust the genes of corn plants so they are tolerant of aggressive weed killer, for example.

The most important surviving relics of the primitive plants are mosses and ferns, which give us a clue to how ancient plants solved the problem of reproduction. They developed spores, or microscopic cells, which fell into the water, germinated, and formed male and female sex organisms that combined to create a new plant. Spores