David Roedl

One of things I look forward to about Christmas break is the chance to read some books for pleasure. Though its a bit premature, I recently launched into The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. I am about 40 pages in and really enjoying it.

In general, the book is explores the interrelations between humans and domesticated plants. What is interesting is that Pollan turns the whole relationship on its head. Instead of looking at the way that humans have manipulated plants evolution to suit our needs, he takes the plants perspective, noting how plants evolve strategies to take advantage of human desires for their own benefit.

This is the basic fact of coevolution as it happens in the wild. One example, and the one first explored by Pollan, is relationship between fruit and the animal desire for sweetness. Sweetness of food has been found to be almost universally desirable across animal species, likely because sugar is the most basic source of energy. Long ago, plants adapted a way to exploit this: packaging their seeds a fleshy container of sucrose, the more mobile creatures were seduced, and somewhere in the process of procuring and eating the fruit, the seeds got dispersed. It is a mutually beneficial exchange: food for transportation.

While this may be a most basic, trivial fact for those more versed in the life sciences, for me it sheds a different shade of light on the whole evolution story. Typical simplified accounts tend to emphasize the adaptation of an individual organism in relation to a somehow inanimate “environment”. From the perspective of coevolution, the concept of the “environment” is merely an abstraction obscuring a picture of a complex ecology of species all evolving together (radically interconnected?). And the histories of some organisms are particularly intertwined.

Pollan spends the first part of his book exploring the mutual story of humans and the apple tree in America…