Got this from Audible. Actually, no: I got it for free as a kind of gift for being a subscriber but got tired of Audible and its DRM bullshit so I downloaded and listened to a pirated version of this and subsequently unsubscribed from Audible. Ahem.
In this surprisingly old book (it was written in 2002) journalist and plant aficionado Michael Pollan takes the well-worn trope of humans using the evolution of plants for their own benefit (i.e. agriculture) and turns its on its head: what if plants have actually used the evolution of humans for their own benefit?
Just to clarify, and Mr. Pollan was well-aware of this too, anthropomorphising evolution or nature and endowing it with such properties as intelligence and design (or intelligent design) is a figure of speech: as far as we know evolution is as purposeful as the flowing of the rivers and the burning of the stars. I’ll leave that one to you.
Botany of Desire
So, Michael Pollan’s idea was to take four species of plants–the tulip, cannabis, the apple and the potato– and examine how not just we humans have used them for our own needs, but also how the plants themselves, in an evolutionary tango with our own species, played on our desires and took advantage of us, too. The book has four chapters, one for each human desire responsible for the propagation of each of the four species of plant: sweetness for apples, beauty for tulips, intoxication for cannabis and control for potatoes.
“Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance.”
In the first part of the book, I enjoyed Pollan’s comparison between the Dionysian and the Apollonian; chaos and order; female and male; yin and yang; nature and culture; the apple’s story and the tulip’s story, which both hold the sperms of their opposite inside them, in true dualist nature. I found this quote particularly interesting: “Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance”, and it becomes more and more relevant as one goes through the book, seeing in every plant’s story the art manifesting itself through the tug–which at the same time is a balancing act–between human structures imposed on nature and nature’s tendency to defy control. Then there’s structure in nature’s chaos and a part that is natural in human structures and so on.
The chapter on cannabis was a little more daring, given marijuana’s legal status (which is, however slowly, changing around the world) and Mr. Pollan shares his insights on that topic and how human societies brought a species underground, where it’s found new life, too. The Apollonian has won, even though the desire itself is Dionysian. Hm. Are all human desires Dionysian, I wonder?
The last chapter was about GMOs and Monsanto’s control on patented potato seeds, including many many other agricultural plants of course. It’s amazing and telling that this chapter, written 12 years ago, seems to sketch the current situation so eloquently. Even though I come from a family background which is 100% anti-GMO, the arguments posited here about the pros and cons of GMOs as well as the pros and cons of organic agriculture seemed very well balanced and neutral to me, and most of all well-argued; in a few words, as close to an objective view as I could hope for. It’s still pro-organic, but cleverly so: it adds an interesting twist from a philosophical, pragmatical and experiential perspective–e.g. the story of the writer’s own batch of GMO potatoes. I would even suggest reading this chapter alone for a nice eagle’s eye view of what’s wrong with GMOs, what they’re supposedly trying to solve and why they’re most probably not going to solve it, creating other unforeseeable problems along the way.
Pollan managed to blend personal experience with journalistic research quite seamlessly and enjoyably, and I feel as though I came out of this read listen more complete and with a greater sense of appreciation for agriculture. Cause you can’t have agriculture without culture. I’m not giving it five stars because… oh I can’t come up with a reason, but hey, I don’t have to give you one, it’s my gut score! It might have to do with the reader of the audiobook whose voice and intonation sometimes annoyed me. I’d give it a 4.5 though, easily.
Thanks go to Karina for first telling me about this book two years ago or so.
“The Dispossessed” left with me a voracious appetite for all things Le Guin and renewed my interest in science fiction in general. This book satisfied the hunger at the same time whetting the appetite just a bit more. Paradoxical? I’ll let the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau answer for me from his honoured and ancient grave: “I’d rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices!” Thank you Goodreads for helping us learn useful(?) quotes.
A lot of people say this book is like Avatar or Pocahontas and that they’ve read this noble savage story before. They’re only superficially right: the nobility of the savages and the Terrans’ barbarism do often lean closer to the stereotypical, I admit. However, the politics are much more believable and down-to-earth, the ending is surprising and a punch-in-the-gut in its almost cynical approach and the love story doesn’t involve two characters; it rather emerges between the reader and the beauty of the Other, the mystery of this foresty world which represents everything Terrans (that is us) lost thousands, if not tens of thousands of years ago.
It’s a very short read, therefore it doesn’t allow itself to go as deep as I would have liked it to into the lives and culture of the Athsheans, who I’m ashamed I had to constantly stop myself thinking of as Ewoks.
All in all, The Word For World Is Forest is as close to Avatar as The Shawshank Redemption is to Prison Break. Make no mistake: this is nothing less than science fiction at its best. I truly hope the rest of her books can keep the bar this high.
Το Βaraka με εκστασίασε και με συγκίνησε όσο ταινίες μετρημένες στα δάχτυλα του ενός χεριού ενός ανθρώπου που του έχουν κόψει μερικά δάχτυλα. 20 χρόνια δεν αμφιβάλλω ότι θα έχουν προσφέρει στον Fricke αρκετή σοφία ώστε να καταφέρει να ξεπεράσει ακόμα και τον ίδιο του τον εαυτό του με το Samsara. Πολυαναμένουμε!
A Short History of Nearly Everything is exactly the kind of book I enjoy. Witty, funny, made me think (each chapter about another facet of life), made me want to read it again sometime in the future –if only to be adequately prepared to duly take notes/highlight quotes from the first to the last page–, I learned things I would have hardly had the chance to find anywhere else and, as the best and most successful of books do, it left me with a different perspective on the world, an outlook on it that is very scientific in its premise and execution but far from anything dogmatic. It has been a humbling reminder and a glorious reassurance of how little we know about the world and at the same time how much we pretend to actually do so because, well… because we’re largely ignorant, scientists not terribly less so than ourselves.
Bill Bryson hops from one scientific field to the next as if he was Super Mario and science was Level 1-1. Within the pages of the same book we can find excellent write-ups on atoms, chemistry, lots of physics and biology, astronomy, geology… He talks about what’s under our feet (tens of kilometres of unexplored crust and a little less of ocean is all we can safely say about the contents of the ~6500km that separate us from the planet core), fossils and how little information they can give us because of their scarcity and the extremely specific conditions under which they form but how much information we try to extract from them…
How unprotected, really, we are in reality from a potential asteroid hit (no, you can’t send nukes or Bruce Willis to an object that you are only able to detect mere weeks before impact at best and which travels at a speed that allows it to cross the entirety of the terrestrial atmosphere within a matter of a single second), or how rumbling, overdue supervolcanos with calderas only slightly larger than the island of Crete could explode any moment now! Earth would survive. Life would probably survive, as it has many times before. Humans and our extremely narrow zone of comfort? Naaah. Bryson helps us understand our place in things, comprehend that our existence might be little more than an inexplicable natural accident, an unrepeatable oddity.
And of course there’s so much more packed in here. So much!
If you’re to read this book, prepare to also read things you would have never imagined about the unknown lives of great scientists, to see fundamental theories of the past go through high and low, be torn apart by dogmatic contemporary peers… The drama of science –what an unlikely, unfortunately, pair of words– and the success and sob stories behind the pioneers and discoveries are often unbelievable. These anecdotes are solid gold.
Together with What On Earth Happened/What On Earth Evolved, this book is a treasure of knowledge and insight. If you like learning stuff about the world for hours on end you seriously can’t miss it. Even if you don’t find learning about the world appealing, well… maybe these books will kick your characteristically human curiosity back into you.
A few days ago I was at one of Mr Blacksnake’s (Mavrofidis) lectures. The subject was Multimedia Application Programming II; the practical side is working with Flash and ActionScript 3.0, the theoretical side is an introduction to systems theory. It really is a good idea. It puts learning how to code and script into perspective, not leaving it just as an empty shell of a skill but actually connecting it with an ontological background. Through understanding the basics principles of object-oriented programming, it seems we might be able to learn a few more things about the basic principles of the universe and how we look at ourselves, which neatly reflects itself into programming and scripts which are of course artificial cosmogenesies and ontologies of their own.
Silently I was pondering these things, paying attention to Mr. Blacksnake’s lecture on autopoeisis. And then it came to me.
I often hear people comparing humans –or other biological organisms, such as animals– to machines, factories or other purely logical systems. I can practically hear mum telling me: “Your body is like a factory so it needs the best materials so that it can work well!”, giving me some vitamins in the process. In some ways this isn’t a bad metaphor. Living beings work by using chemical reactions in order to perceivably achieve certain goals, a conjunction of which actually allows the individual to survive. However, such approaches often reduce personality, cultural traits and other signs of behaviour to mere results of genetics, natural selection and instincts. They’re closer to saying “living beings are just computers that run certain programs, and those programs are written on their genes. They’re saved in the individual’s ROM (Read-Only Memory) and as such cannot be modified by environmental factors. Instincts, social behaviour and traits to our knowledge only found in humans, such as creative inclination, aren’t fundamentally different to each other. They’re just steps of different height in humanity’s long and ascending staircase of evolution”.
Agreed, some basic behaviour is written on our genes, the kind no person or living organism can do without; nutrition, rest, breathing, reproduction. But human behaviour and activity lies far beyond just munching, sleeping and having sex. What we as humans use to separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom lies comfortably in the domain of culture: language, facial expressions, logic, ethics, art, means of communication, even self-consciousness and self-awareness. All these aspects are taught to us from an early age from our parents and the rest of society. People seem to inherently and genetically possess the mental capabilities for what we would call advanced thought, communication in the form of language, logic and being self-aware. What’s notable though is that we’re born just with the capability, not the ability itself. If we’re never taught how to speak a language, we’ll never learn any language. If we’re never taught in an early age that what we see in the mirror is ourselves and that a clear distinction between our self and the rest of the world does in fact exist, we’ll never develop an ego and/or self-awareness. Everything that makes us what we would call human in the social sense is thus culturally acquired and not passed down through our genes.
There is some evidence that human social behaviour is not hereditary information passed down through the genome. We have learned as much from children that for various reasons lacked parent care and grew up on their own or were raised by animals. These feral children, as they are known, typically walk on all fours or swing from tree to tree, growl and do not show signs of human self-awareness, such as recognising themselves in the mirror. In most cases feral children later introduced to human society have not been able to adapt, ie go through the enculturation process expected complete by all. To me that is no mystery. We presume feral children should be able to adapt to human societies just because they’re human, just because the rest of the “normal” humans are like that, have always been. We expect that just because everyone behaves in a certain way that it’s somehow ingrained, that it’s natural. But let’s think about that for a second; there is an amazing variety in different cultures around the world. If it was ingrained, we’d expect cultures, especially ones in similar climates, would show more similarities. Furthermore, how easy is it for Greeks to, for instance, get accustomed to British culture? Not very. It might take years for the individual to adapt to the subtle changes in everyday life and performances. They might always stand out as strange, unadaptable. How can we thus expect a human nurtured as a dog, wolf or monkey to fare any better?
I’m inviting you to research feral children, look for info and videos.
You might be as shocked as I was.
This is the idea that came to my mind not unlike a frothing cascade while listening to Mr Mavrofidis: humans are indeed comparable to computers. But not in the logical, deterministic sense. A computer consists of hardware and software. The hardware is the the physical part — the CPU, the GPU, RAM etc — and the software is the programs, the ideas, the zeros and ones that come into existence through the hardware. The two depend on one another to carry out what they were designed for. Software would not exist without hardware, it needs hardware to be activated. Hardware, on the other hand, has no reason to exist if no software exists to use it. So was it software or hardware the first of the two to be designed? It reminds me of universal questions involving chickens and eggs… Roots aside, hardware of the last 25 years or so does have a kind of software that runs with no need for software present. It’s the Basic Input/Output System. Some version of BIOS is present in all computer’s motherboard’s Read-Only Memory and it basically tells it what to do when it is turned on, where to look for the real software, when to shutdown if the CPU is overheating etc… See where I’m going with this already?
Hardware, the vessel, the physical counterpart, is the human body. Software we can divide into BIOS and the Operating System. I’m taking into account every feature, program and application executable through the OS and every goal achievable through it as part of the OS. The BIOS is hereditary behaviour, what we could call instincts. Hunger, sexual urges and what we might do to satisfy them, aversion to pain and danger, perhaps some inclination for style of movement or typical gestures (a man I know does some of his father’s gestures without ever having met him), seeking warmth or shade in respective situations, the list goes on. These functions ensure survival of our “hardware”, just like the BIOS does for computers. It also bridges the gap between the physical and the mental, paves the road to the land of behaviour and culture.
Now, the human Operating System isn’t exactly like having Windows, Linux or Mac OSX installed on your PC. Windows was designed to fulfill certain working requirements, such as giving the user the flexibility to switch from one task to the other quickly, efficiently and aesthetically pleasantly. The human Operating System has not been designed by anyone in particular: it’s a conglomeration of different behaviour patterns (culture?) mostly but not exclusively taken up at childhood, chiefly influenced by any given social standards and by each individual’s parents (the parents also in turn chiefly influenced by any given social standards). Culture, of course, is a very complicated matter, and it penetrates our minds so deeply and thoroughly, it subconsciously makes us think that it, the way WE see the world, is the only truth. In fact, each one of us runs a different OS, comprising many different little “modules”: tastes, opinions, ideas, sexual preference, self-esteem, modes of interaction with others, sense of humour, what we think of or what we do when we are alone… Everything we might call personality falls under this category. Yes, who we are belongs squarely in the realm of nurtured behaviour, the kind of stuff we pick up, imitate (with criteria already imitated by our parents, parent figures, maybe something BIOS-like on the way? I don’t know) and then reproduce ourselves, ready for others to pick up and imitate. It reminds me of Richard Dawkin’s “meme”s, so narrowly used in today’s internet cyberculture.
The more I thought about it, the more it all connected, and the more it all frightened me. The mere existence, the mere plausibility of phenomena such as feral children doubts, deconstructs even, the fabric of the foundations of human society, what’s considered right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. It disconnects humanity from humans! It’s easy to say but you can’t really wrap your head around it. A human can just as easily be encultured to become dog, wolf or monkey, as well as a human, in all our different forms through different cultures and, ultimately, Operating Systems. The reverse has been tried and tested with limited success (think about wild cats next to human-raised cats), but no chimp, for example, has fully taken up human behaviour through nurturing. Does that mean human hardware is more “advanced”, has a broader range of selection, is more adaptable? Possibly. But the fact on its own proves nothing. Furthermore, it underlines what we already know but refuse to admit: that the human condition, in all its known forms through different cultures and wildly variable manifestations of unique and reproducing Operating Systems, cannot be pigeonholed into a standard set of values. Why? Simply because what we accept as our society today is one of many, one condition out of infinite, an activation bound by randomness, maintained by constant imitation, brought forward not by necessity nor efficiency.
What was first? Hardware of software? Chicken or egg? Did humans evolve their hardware together with their software, was software evolved because of the advanced hardware, did the hardware expand its capabilities to satisfy the growing demands of the software? Was there any evolution in the first place?
If computers were designed by humans to fulfill certain tasks, their competence of carrying out those tasks would separate the computers with superior hardware –and therefore a wider selection of superior software– from the rest. What purpose, what task might humans have embedded in their “design”, by which their “competence” might be measured? An answer to that wouldn’t come short of the meaning of life… The purpose of it all?
I could go on and on. I already feel this is too long for anyone on the web to have the attention required to read — friends and family included. I hope I have inspired some thought to anyone brave and patient enough to have read this far! I will sign off with an impressive, memorable little something Karina replied to me when I once asked her what came first: human nature or human culture.
Nature is cultural. I mean, think of the distinction between a natural phenomenon and a natural disaster. They’re both different interpretations of the same thing. The difference lies in humanity’s ability to deal with them effectively. The distinction between us humans and “nature” is purely cultural, constructed. We wouldn’t be speaking of nature if a concept of nature did not exist.
However, culture is also natural. The development of the concept of culture in humans has been a natural evolutionary process that has taken thousands of years and has come about because of social interaction in our species, and other unknown factors. We wouldn’t be speaking of culture if our species hadn’t evolved into a being capable of speech.
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
