I’m thinking specifically of one of the largest, most diverse families of flowering plants: the 25,000 species of orchids that, over the past 80 million years or so, have managed to colonize six continents and virtually every conceivable terrestrial habitat, from the deserts of western Australia to the cloud forests of Central America, from the forest canopy to the underground, from remote Mediterranean mountaintops to living rooms, offices, and restaurants the world over. How do you spread your genes around when you’re stuck in place? You get really, really good at things like biochemistry, at engineering, design, and color, and at the art of manipulating the “higher” creatures, up to and including animals like us. (I suppose an article by a biped named Pollan will have to do.) For while we were nailing down locomotion, consciousness, and language, the plants were hard at work developing a whole other bag of tricks, taking account of the key existential fact of plant life: rootedness. So let us celebrate some other pinnacles of evolution, the kind that would get a lot more press if natural history were written by plants rather than animals. But the next time you’re tempted to celebrate human consciousness as the pinnacle of evolution, stop to consider where you got that idea. To animals like ourselves, these are the tools for living we deem the most “advanced,” which is not at all surprising, since they have been the shining destinations of our evolutionary journey thus far. True, they lack such abilities as locomotion, the command of tools and fire, the miracles of consciousness and language. Yet plants get along in life just fine, thank you, and did so for millions of years before we came along. When we want to dismiss a fellow human as ineffectual or superfluous, we call him a “potted plant.” A “vegetable” is how we refer to a person reduced to utter helplessness, having lost most of the essential tools for getting along in life. We animals don’t give plants nearly enough credit. National Geographic Magazine, September 1, 2009 Love and Lies How do you spread your genes around when you're stuck in one place? By tricking animals, including us, into falling in love.
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