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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 06 Jul 2019

Taken: 29 Dec 2018

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Pitcher Plant

Pitcher Plant
. . . Jonathan Smith has pointed out, in Darwin’s books about botany, there is something about Darwin’s preoccupation with the ordinary that extends beyond realism. Darwin’s preoccupation with the aberrant and the unique and the grotesque (as traces of indicators of large movements and significances) extends in the botany books to the study of plants that are truly, as Smith put it, “macabre,”

plants that trapped, killed and ate insects;. . . bizarrely ornamented, gaudy colored, fantastically structured flowers that lured insects into unwittingly effecting cross-fertilization: and. . . species with various sexual forms and multiple reproductive possibilities. While these works also embodied a realistic spirit, the literature of the day that most looked like Darwin’s botany was not the realistic novel of Trollope and Eliot, but the “sensation fiction” that flourished in those same decades, the thrilling novels full of shocking crimes and illicit sexuality by Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, and others. ~ Page 127

DARWIN THE WRITER

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Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . The chemical influence is the residue of ancient signaling between organisms, pressed inward. The action potential, too, existed in cells before animals evolved, and exists today outside them. The first one ever measured, in fact, was in plant, the Venus flytrap, at the instigation of Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century. Even some single-celled organisms have action potentials.

What nervous systems make possible is not cell-to-cell signaling itself -- that is common -- but particular kinds of signaling. Nervous systems are fast, first of all. Except in a few cases like the Venus flytrap, plants act on a slowed time scale. Second, the neuron’s long, tenuous projections enable one cell to reach some distance through the brain or body and affect just a few distant cells; influence is ‘targeted’. Evolution has transformed cell-to-cell signaling from an activity in which cells simply broadcast their signaling from an activity in which cells simply broadcast their signals to whoever is close enough and listening into something different: an organized network. In a nervous system like our own, the result is a continual electrical clamor, a symphony of tiny cellular fits, mediated by sprays of chemicals across the gaps where one ell reaches out to another. ~ Page 23

OTHER MINDS
15 months ago. Edited 15 months ago.

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