(August 26, 2017 at 10:46 am)Khemikal Wrote: Put another way, the sessile lords of organic chemistry have no need of our pathetic neural strategies. They're capable of creating adaptive structures out of light and dirt to handle any obstacle that we are forced to rely on our wonky-ass brains to overcome. They -already- possess solutions to problems we'll have to think about one day - they're so good at it, we rely on them to solve our problems for us. Theyre the reason we can breathe, they're the reason we don;t starve, and we build our own survival structures -from- them. In their absence, no amount of thinking would overcome those fundamental problems. We even spend a significant amount of our own human effort carting them all over the place...so much for their immobility. How was this accomplished? They caught our eye, our nose, our tongue...our imaginations.
I have to ask again...whose the domesticate, really, in this relationship? Which is a representative of the more "highly developed" species? Which possesses greater evolutionary advantage? Just whose rock is this, ours or theirs...and which is more likely to outlive the other?
I'm with you on the use of "higher" to describe different adaptions. Every extant species is a winner in the same competition over the same length of time. Wouldn't be surprised if less complex creatures were the last ones standing before the sun is snuffed out. On the other hand I admit to having evolved to prefer my own specie's modes of adaption.
Sounds like your thinking about sessile lords of the plant world has evolved beyond The Botany of Desire. Is that what got you launched on the topic?
