"The single great existential fact of plant life is... well, they can’t locomote. They can move with the wind and water, but they can’t pick themselves up and go. So what they’ve worked on, what they have, are chemicals instead of legs. Cannabis works on our minds in order to borrow our feet, basically. And plants have developed this incredible variety of molecules either to attract or repel other species. They have to rely on chemistry for their defense and for their propagation: for their movement. And they’ve gotten really, really good at this."—Michael Pollan (link)
"If I sit back and say "what's the purpose in life? Why should anyone care that I live here and you live here and so on?" In the end, after many drinks, I've come to the conclusion that the goal in life is to acquire knowledge, and to make sure that knowledge is preserved. […] We're now finding earth-like planets that are "only thirteen light-years away!" Isn't that great? I think that's wonderful, but how long would it take to get a human there? Will they survive? Probably not. If we want to explore the universe, then I think we have to do it with machines that don't breathe oxygen and are not sensitive to the things we are sensitive to. And so in the end here I think this is all about accelerating knowledge accretion, and intelligent machines are an amazing tool for accelerating that."—Jeff Hawkins (50:00)
"Other seeds are able to remain alive for astonishing periods. One of the most remarkable examples comes from an archaeological site in Japan. Two thousand years ago, a small settlement stood at a place called Asada. The people who lived here had only just begun to master the art of working metal. They were also among the first people in Japan who knew how to plant and reap rice. They stored this in small pits in the ground. In one of those pits scientists found a magnolia seed. They took that strange ancient seed, planted it, and it grew. In its tenth year it produced its first flower buds. Magnolias typically have six petals on their flowers, but this plant had a variable number of petals on each flower. Could this be an ancient species that has only survived with that one lone seed in an archaeological ruin? This is surely a marvelous example of the fact that plants with their seeds are not only extraordinary travelers in space, but incomparable travelers in time."—David Attenborough The Private Life of Plants (45:00 or 00:00)
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"A Russian team discovered a seed cache of Silene stenophylla, a flowering plant native to Siberia, that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel near the banks of the Kolyma River. Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the seeds were 32,000 years old. Some of the immature seeds retained viable plant material. The team extracted that tissue from the frozen seeds, placed it in vials, and successfully germinated the plants."—Rachel Kaufman (link)
"We give ourselves altogether too much credit in our dealings with other species. Even the power over nature that domestication supposedly represents is overstated. It takes two to perform that particular dance, after all, and plenty of plants and animals have elected to sit it out. Try as they might, people have never been able to domesticate the oak tree, whose highly nutritious acorns remain far too bitter for humans to eat. Evidently the oak has such a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel—which obligingly forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn or so that the tree has never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us."—Michael Pollan (Page 5) Mr. Pollan cites Guns, Germs, and Steel in his chapter notes, and that book discusses acorns on page 128.
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