Are Plants Farming Us?
inleo.io
inleo.io
> 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.
Human evolves from worm. Human brain is originally a bunch of neurons centered around the worm's mouth to search for food. It is natural to think human is still controlled by stomach to this day (or spinal cord for that matter).
The code just wants to survive.
… then you’re damn right.
I suppose that makes us as domesticated as e.g. lions or chimpanzees, which have been known to e.g. share food with humans ("work for them") in the wild but it's not their reason for existence.
In general they still totally depend on it.
So this would be like saying dogs aren't domesticated, because some left their owners or bit them, or there are groups of stray dogs here and there.
Domestication of plants was "easy" when tested in a controlled setting selecting seeds carefully at a university. Estimated that wheat in the agricultural "revolution" (a much scoffed about term in the book) could have been domesticated in 200 years if purposeful. Instead agriculture took something like 3000 years to become dominant versus mixed food sources (mostly gathering, fishing and hunting, with some low-effort planting on riverbanks).
And yes to your point, the idea that there is some sort of progression in human societies is contradicted by the recent decades of evidence in archeology -- every arrangement you can imagine seems to have been tried (stationary+hunter/gather, nomadic farmer, alternating back and forth, shifts toward farming for hundreds of years and then back to fishing for thousands). Humans time on the earth has been much longer than our recorded history, with more variety and less boring than we usually assume.
Anyway I hope that inspires someone to pick up the book, it really is a good read.
Etymology never made for very compelling arguments.
It is to make one think that systems (of any kind) can be seen from more than one perspective. It's an attempt to foster empathy through an absurd (yet possible) idea.
There are many of those kinds of tales. Sometimes it does not work, the listener can't bring itself to be empathic to other point of view. Always worth a try though.
It has to have more instances of failing successfully than any other system. The most coveted plants are the ones that increased their reproduction by evolving deterrents to consumption. They contain irritants to specifically prevent animals from eating them. Those irritants have strong, often bitter flavors and occasionally go so far as to antagonize temperature receptors, yet we eat them specifically because of those irritants. It would be a huge failure if we were eating them in the wild, but because we cultivate them, they are now some of the most widespread and successful plants.
Maybe their goal is just to photosynthetize and grow and the bitter flavors and other products and interactions are not that important (for them).
I don't know. Maybe they're high tech time travelling solar panels and radiator systems sent back to prevent the early drying of the planet.
Can you think of plants outside of the traditional evolutionary paradigm, just for a while? That is the challenge of this idea.
Plants are naturally a bit protected from animal predators by a simple economics of scale: proteins require nitrogen, we can't get it from the air even though it's abundant there, we need to get it from nitrogen fixing bacteria but those are farmed by plants in their plant roots... But plants are mostly cellulose and don't have much nitrogen by proportion. But then they are also actively protected by being extremely effective poison manufacturers, using their rigid cell walls to put things at high pressures, growing around pests, cutting off resources to leaves and regrowing them after the predator moves on, and attracting predators of their predators like ladybugs.
But the networks of interdependence that we eventually form should perhaps not be put into a traditional exploiter/exploited juxtaposition. “How can I tweak myself so that you find me indispensable?” is a question both the humans and the plants are asking of themselves vis-a-vis each other.
So there could be a gene selecting for getting watered by humans (e.g. via wilting or colour).
This can also create a connection between genes and memes e.g. a new flower characteristic could be genetic but affect popular memetic choice.
The concept is hard to grok & explain, so beware that there's a good chance I've misunderstood and mistranslated the idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype#Summary
I thought fruits are nutritious because they are there to support the seed during its journey.
The food for the seed is inside of the seed, which is often not the fruit. Most fruits are different anatomically, but you will find that an apple has little seeds, you open it and you will find endosperm in it, mostly food for the little embryo in the seed.
For stuff like wheat we really do eat the endosperm, but for stuff like apples and watermelons and peaches, we spit out the seeds. (For peaches we often don't even see the seed, which is hidden inside of a woody endocarp, you can crack it open and find the actual seed inside.
So if you thought that the peach meat was the food for the seed you were doubly wrong, you need to go several layers deep in order to find the seed food.
Alternatively, there are always many different perspectives and humans naturally default to the human-centric perspective, all else being equal (for obvious reasons).
Basically, weed rewards us for its continued safe domestication.
Try as I might, I cannot find a way to disprove this theory. The more I test it, the more it seems absolutely correct.
The same of course, is true of coffee and tobacco, albeit the means of domestication differ in magnitude and effect in each case.
The jury is still out on Triffids, however.