The Overstory: Maybe nature isn't so red of tooth and claw

MIne too, hallelujah! It was a long time coming.

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And while we don’t have movies yet, we have lectures via zoom!

One of my garden groups has a monthly speaker and associated events but hadn’t since February until we did a Zoom meeting in July. Looks like there’ll be another in August. I’ve watched a couple other garden/plant centered Zooms with other groups but no where near as many as my wife. She is practically interested in everything - well, except for the botanical names of plants which make her eyes cross.

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bloom with zoom!

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Well, there are hard facts and there are artistic ways to approach the issue (fiction). Both have value.

I’ve read most of the Overstorey but stopped before the end. Maybe I’m a too simple-minded biologist to get the greatness of the story. The story has taken some facts and added a lot of fiction to them. Within its’ genre, it has probably done more good than harm to this planet. In addition, many have liked the story.

A cold fact is that, in nature, even mutualistic relationships are basically selfish. When inspected in detail, most mutualistic relationships vary from +/- to +/+ (antagonistic to mutualistic), depending on environmental conditions. At least that’s what I’m teaching to students.
But that’s just the cold and boring facts. Also storytelling has it’s place, as long as we don’t lose the perception of what is reality and what is fiction.

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I would put it in what I think are even stronger terms, that while the scientific approach of objective observation has value, life requires subjective participation. While in science we must set aside belief and what we want as irrelevant, in life our belief and what we want are central. We just have to acknowledge that we don’t all believe and want precisely the same things in life, and so we have a variety of artists with different styles painting greatly different pictures of things.

I mean hooray for gardeners and the great beauty of forests and plants. Our life would be a great deal poorer without many of them and likely impossible without at least some of them. But there is great beauty in the animal kingdom as well and I would even suggest that they are ultimately more rewarding in a relationship because they are more capable of responding. And in a likewise manner I would caution against excessive exaggeration of the value of animals over people for the same reason. Some of our religious fellows may even take this one step further from people to God.

So if the point of the romantic fantasy (art as you say) is simply to help us to not to overlook the value of some things in life, I could not agree more. It is only when it is used to denigrate the value of other aspects of life that I would object. Though… more than that, I object to the tendency of both the scientist and the religious to reduce life to no more than mechanism. The scientists do it with a description of living things as machines and the religious do it with the worship of God as a great watchmaker – both overlooking the intentional role that living things have in their own development.

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Finished this interesting book a couple days ago. The last, shortest chapter titled “Seeds” opens with a one page description of the history of life on our planet, imagining it as happening in one 24 hour day. It would be interesting to see how well it accords with the understanding of those here who think about the origins and timeline of life.

From The Overstory by Richard Powers:

Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day.

First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning -a million million years of branching- nothing more exists than lean and simple cells.

Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.

The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout -backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.

Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.

Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.