Have I written on this before?
One of the more essential aspects of plants, in my view, is their sheer presence in the world, and this presence is no more apparent than in their method of reproduction. Mammals have evolved special organs in which they nurture a fetus until it is strong enough to survive in an open environment. Some species have evolved long gestations to facilitate the long period of nurturance that complex neural systems, for example, require to develop. Other classes of animals, such as fish, amphibians and reptiles, have evolved other strategies, such as producing and fertilizing relatively huge numbers of eggs in order to increase the odds of species survival in their favor. Only mammals have uteruses, organs that I like to think of as specialized and super-protective environments to allow for an incubation period that occurs inside rather than outside a sexually-reproducing animal.
How strange and instructive it is, then, that plants have evolved in such a way that they are capable of carrying out the complex and delicate process of fertilization, let alone incubation, such that it is, more or less entirely outside of their organism. And not only does it occur outside of plant bodies, but it also requires, by design, the involvement of other beings, namely birds, bees, bats and even human beings, as well as other creatures.
In this sense, agency, at least the agency of sexual reproduction, cannot be ascribed to a single organism, but is necessarily a group project. I said earlier that plants are instructive in this way because such a clear example of agency existing as a feature of a collective rather than an individual, as a dynamic of an ecology rather than an organism, points to the collective nature of human agency. Where would we be, for example, without the help of the countless organisms that inhabit our bodies and make them work?
As I have written before in this blog, and as scientists and scholars such as Pollan, Chamovitz, Mancuso, Hall, Nealon and others have elaborated, plants stand to teach us a lot not only about themselves but about us and about life in general as well. The beauty of plants is that all aspects of their lives are always on display for us to observe, such is their prepossessing and - seemingly - unselfconscious generosity.
Talk about tough.
One of the more essential aspects of plants, in my view, is their sheer presence in the world, and this presence is no more apparent than in their method of reproduction. Mammals have evolved special organs in which they nurture a fetus until it is strong enough to survive in an open environment. Some species have evolved long gestations to facilitate the long period of nurturance that complex neural systems, for example, require to develop. Other classes of animals, such as fish, amphibians and reptiles, have evolved other strategies, such as producing and fertilizing relatively huge numbers of eggs in order to increase the odds of species survival in their favor. Only mammals have uteruses, organs that I like to think of as specialized and super-protective environments to allow for an incubation period that occurs inside rather than outside a sexually-reproducing animal.
How strange and instructive it is, then, that plants have evolved in such a way that they are capable of carrying out the complex and delicate process of fertilization, let alone incubation, such that it is, more or less entirely outside of their organism. And not only does it occur outside of plant bodies, but it also requires, by design, the involvement of other beings, namely birds, bees, bats and even human beings, as well as other creatures.
In this sense, agency, at least the agency of sexual reproduction, cannot be ascribed to a single organism, but is necessarily a group project. I said earlier that plants are instructive in this way because such a clear example of agency existing as a feature of a collective rather than an individual, as a dynamic of an ecology rather than an organism, points to the collective nature of human agency. Where would we be, for example, without the help of the countless organisms that inhabit our bodies and make them work?
As I have written before in this blog, and as scientists and scholars such as Pollan, Chamovitz, Mancuso, Hall, Nealon and others have elaborated, plants stand to teach us a lot not only about themselves but about us and about life in general as well. The beauty of plants is that all aspects of their lives are always on display for us to observe, such is their prepossessing and - seemingly - unselfconscious generosity.
Talk about tough.
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