Cool title, isn’t it? It comes from the head of the page I’m just going to let you read a quote from in a moment. Remember who has the balls? I just discovered back this book, within a pile of manuscripts I’m lurking through (e.g. involving mating in clonal orchards -ah, pollen flows!). This book, Tropical Nature, by Forsyth & Miyata. The reason I didn’t get the whole thing through at once is that writing style is changing from a chapter to the other, and though it is a great book, it makes me reading at different speeds (and what’s more, I eventually lost the thing in the wrong pile: the non-priority reads). While Bugs and drugs is the chapter’s name, 101 is the page I’m going to quote, you know, so that the blog won’t stay silent for too long… Here we go:
Despite our lack of participation in the evolutionary processes that led to plant secondary compounds in the rain forests of tropical America, our fundamental biochemical kinship with other inhabitants of the area through time allows us to be both victim and beneficiary of this long, silent, ceaseless history. Human use of hallucigenic plants is nothing more than an evolutionary epiphenomenon, an accidental and unpredictable result of our common heritage of neurotransmission with the plant’s real enemies.
No, these aren’t trying to speak to us. Period. Ask a DUI rodent (gosh I was trying to get at a ROUS!).
Filed under: English, Evolution, Plant stuff, Postponed
