The Light Eaters

The Light Eaters

Bibliography

• Author: Zoë Schlanger
• Full_Title: The Light Eaters
• Category: books
• Last Highlighted Date: 2025-01-22 14:55:51.100225+00:00

Highlights

• I learned that a complete fern genome had been sequenced for the first time, and a paper on it would be coming out soon. I didn’t yet know how remarkable that was—ferns, being extremely ancient, can have up to 720 pairs of chromosomes, versus humans’ mere 23, which explained why the genomic revolution took so long to reach them.
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• The experience of flashes of the eternal, the real, the gestalt, runs like a thread throughout naturalist literature. I wasn’t the only one who had been taken like this before. In Pilgrim on Tinker Creek, the writer Annie Dillard has a similar moment in front of a tree, watching light pour through its branches. A flash of the real. Almost as soon as she realizes she is having it, it is gone, but it leaves her with the awareness of a sort of open-plan attentiveness that can be accessed in snippets, and which might be a more direct observation of the world than the usual everyday version.
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• Humboldt went on to introduce the European intellectual world to the concept of the planet as a living whole, with climatic systems and interlocking biological and geological patterns bound up as a “net-like, intricate fabric.” This was Western science’s earliest glimmer of ecological thinking, where the natural world became a series of biotic communities, each acting upon the others.
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• Actual fern sex turned out to be much weirder. First of all, they reproduce using spores, not seeds. But here’s the kicker: they have swimming sperm. Before they grow into the leafy fronds we all know, they have a completely separate life as a gametophyte fern, a tiny lobed plant just one cell thick—not remotely recognizable as the fern it will later become. You’d miss them on the forest floor. The male gametophyte fern releases sperm that swim in water collected on the ground after a rain, looking for female gametophyte fern eggs to fertilize. Fern sperm are shaped like tiny corkscrews and are endurance athletes—they can swim for up to sixty minutes. You can watch them squiggle under a microscope.
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• Recently, as I came across in my reading, researchers had found promising indicators of memory in plants. Others found that a wide variety of plants are able to distinguish themselves from others, and can tell whether or not those others are genetic kin. When such plants find themselves beside their siblings, they rearrange their leaves within two days to avoid shading them. Pea shoot roots appeared to be able to hear water flowing through sealed pipes and grow toward them, and several plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off.
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• Just as common as the papers exploring plant intelligence were the responses denouncing the burgeoning field, most often for word choice. Intelligence, applied to plants, did not sit well with plenty of plant scientists. Consciousness, a yet bolder conjecture, even less so. They made good points; plants don’t have brains, much less neurons. And plants evolved to meet challenges so different from our own. What need would they have for either of those things?
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• Science indeed has no agreed-upon definition for life, death, intelligence, nor consciousness. Words certainly matter, but the definitions of these words are not settled, and are therefore expansive. Could plants not hold intelligences that look quite different from our own? And the truth was, whatever electrical signaling pseudo-nervous system they were talking about sounded extremely compelling.
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• It was clear that the anti-plant-intelligence camp wished to be explicit that plants are not like animals. But they were using a human-centric definition of intelligence and consciousness to claim that plants couldn’t possibly possess either thing. That argument seemed to me like it was marred by an internal contradiction; it doubled back on itself.
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• Over and over, I saw the debate framed as a dispute over syntax. But it looked to me more of a dispute over worldview. Over the nature of reality. Over what plants were, particularly in contrast to ourselves.
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• To see nature that way, I knew, was only a partial view. Nature is not a puzzle waiting to be put together, or a codex waiting to be deciphered. Nature is chaos in motion. Biological life is a spiraling diffusion of possibilities, fractal in its profusion. Every organism, and certainly every plant, has ricocheted out of another fragment of the evolutionary web of green leafy things to variate further.
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• Measuring plants against human cognition made no sense; it just rendered plants as lesser humans, lesser animals. Anthropomorphizing was dangerous because it diminished these green bodies, leaving no room for the recognition that plants deploy several senses—or could one say, intelligences?—that far exceed anything humans can do in a similar category. Our versions of those senses, if we even have them, are paltry in comparison.
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• As photons from the sun fall upon a plant’s outstretched green parts, chloroplasts in the leaf cell convert the particle of light into chemical energy. This solar power gets stored inside specialized energy-storing molecules, the rechargeable battery packs of the plant world.
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• water and carbon dioxide molecules are ripped apart. Half of the oxygen molecules from both parties float away from this meeting, passing back out into the world through the parted lips of the stomata—becoming the air we breathe. The carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that remains is spun into strands of sugary glucose.
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• every animal organ was built with sugar from plants.
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• All the glucose in the world, whether it arrives in your body packaged inside a banana or a slice of wheat bread, was manufactured out of thin air by a plant in the moment after photons from the sun fell upon it.
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• seems to me that plant blindness is something deeper, more tied to value systems, which are of course a product of cultural perspective. Indeed, not all cultures have this problem. Virtually all Indigenous groups around the world have a more intimate relationship with and recognition of plant life. Many cultures ascribe personhood to plants, humans being just one type of person. Human persons and plant persons are often literally related: the Canela, a group of Indigenous peoples in Brazil, include plants in their family structures. Gardeners are parents; beans and squash are their daughters and sons.
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• Aristotle believed humans had “rational souls,” but all other animals had only “locomotive souls,” propelling them forward, without thought, toward reproduction and survival. That general idea held sway in the Western world for two millennia, and was renewed in the seventeenth century by French philosopher and scientist René Descartes, who believed animal bodies were just solvable puzzles of physics and chemistry, popularizing the notion of the “animal machine.”
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• Reflecting on the way animals were up until very recently viewed is useful to our story about plants because it serves as a potent example of the fluctuations of scientific opinion. It also shows how philosophy and ethics can come to intervene in the way non-human creatures are viewed. If left entirely up to science, it would likely have taken much longer (if it came to pass at all) to view animals as worthy of some semblance of humane treatment. We don’t think much, now, of the fact that we grant at least some animals the benefits of personality and intelligence. We’ve also decided that it is cruel to do them harm.
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• Aristotle believed humans had “rational souls,” but all other animals had only “locomotive souls,” propelling them forward, without thought, toward reproduction and survival. That general idea held sway in the Western world for two millennia, and was renewed in the seventeenth century by French philosopher and scientist René Descartes, who believed animal bodies were just solvable puzzles of physics and chemistry, popularizing the notion of the “animal machine.”
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• But humans, despite the mechanistic nature of their bodies, had an ineffable sense of reason and a soul that distinguished them from other animals. Dogs, it was then thought, did not. The way a dog perceives its environment, or even feels sensation, were not truly conscious experiences but rather the rote reflexes of an automaton. Any expression of pain, like barking, was the same; just a reflex.
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