Yuval Noah Harari light heartedly raises the question in his book Sapiens, of whether men domesticated wheat or wheat domesticated humans.
Humans went from wandering through the world exploring and foraging, to doing the back breaking work to grow and farm wheat.
Wheat went from being fairly unsuccessful in evolutionary terms, to covering something like 20% of the earths surface !
Something similar is suggested to a lesser extent about psychedelic mushrooms by Melvin Sheldrake in Entangled Life. No where near the same scale as wheat, of course.
Another Sapiens reader. Look, I don’t care how uppity those maize are – there’s no way they trained us into cultivating them, we slaughtered their brothers and sisters and kept only the tamer, weaker, fatter renditions that we could use for our own means. If that benefits them, then they’re psychopaths.
Corn is not sentient, and I will die on this hill!
Corn is the vegetation equivalent of a cubicle dweller.
I feel like I heard this perspective elsewhere…it may have been The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Which I really enjoyed, myself.
But everyone knows that the kingdom that’s really in charge is the fungi.
Well, you must be a real fungi at parties.
Relevant
Giving in to the wheat propaganda, I see
so one of those Wheat Council creeps go to you to too, huh?
YOU BETTER RUN, WHEAT!
that was an edgy idea in the book, but stuff like that happens in ecological systems all the time. I read the book around the time of the election, and it read like a manifesto to justify oligarchic takeover as the next phase of human development (see the part how societal rules where assigned to the government and how the internet will take it back)
Ah, but you forget, Maizen have a collective identity, so stalks think nothing of sacrificing their individual lives for the good of the whole.
if they compete for sunlight and happily smother their brethren in this fruitful pursuit, then they’re no better than us at chucking each other under the bus in the name of this so called collective ‘progress’
So what you’re saying is, maize domesticated us, but it’s also sociopathic and generally evil, and probably believes in eugenics with a side of racism.
Wouldn’t fungus be more immediately interested in being among us?
More like fungsus
There isn’t mushroom amongus for the fungus to rule. They won’t be able to be a funguy and party.
Oh really?
Then let’s accelerate climate change. I won’t let those green fuckers win
That’s right! Besides food, clothing, housing, tools, weapons, erosion control, and beauty, what have the plants ever done for us?
Brought peas?
I love peas
They literally just fucking sit there, I’ve seen Jumanji I know what they could do, they just choose not to
have you seen them in cemeteries, thier roots easily penetrates a casket and suck the corpse dry. also works on asphalt and pipes.
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Yeah but they do them for the wrong reasons. If you were a slave and your master gave u food, clothe and housing would you think “wow what a wonderful master, I’m gonna work extra hard for them”? Well its like that but with the plants. They are enslaving us and we can’t just let them get away with it. /s
Also oxygen…
Medicine. A lot of plants are used in medicine as well. Asprin came from tree bark.
Okay. Food, clothing, housing, tools, weapons, erosion control, beauty, oxygen, and medicine. But other than that, what have the plants ever done for us?
drugs
That’s too slow. Take us to defcon one.
I’m Jewish, so unfortunately, Kanye has already taken me to death con 5. But I’m not sure if those are related.
Actually Kanye took you to Death con 3, then admitted he chose the because he couldn’t remember if 5 or 1 was the worst one.
Won’t the extra CO2 just help the heartier plants (weeds) take over?
The common, did we domesticate XYZ, or did XYZ domesticate us? Conundrum.
Myc is the real death dinner monster. When everything dies, it’ll be them that don’t and then eat everyone else’s of whatever’s left.
Cats
Yep. We feed cats, they kill pests which would otherwise give us disease and spoil our foods.
Makes you think that domestication is maybe the wrong paradigm, neither or us domesticated each other (or we both did) but truly it’s a mutually beneficial partnership, something that is actually common in nature.
I love cats. They choose every day to continue being our friends. They didn’t need to be genetically mutilated to love us unconditionally like dogs. Cats are free creatures.
And we feed then every day so they don’t kill and eat us.
Old Deuteronomy.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2b3rb0
This is part one of “the botany of desire”, exploring how four plants, apples, tulips, cannabis and potatoes have adapted to human desires, which in turn has made them some of the most successful plant species around the world. The rest of the parts are on Dailymotion too for those interested.
Yup, bury me in a burlap sack in a deciduous forest.
Why deciduous? Because fuck pine trees, that’s why. I don’t want to feed those assholes.
Or - get this - it is all a cycle.
We could call it the carbon cycle!
Pfft, next you’re going to be selling me on the idea that we’re all made of carbon
Eukaryotes likely evolved during The Great Oxidation Event which saw oxygen levels rise to levels that were toxic to the Cyanobacteria (which use photosynthesis). We evolved to save them!
Symbiosis
It’s mutually beneficial gardening.
Oof! Cool perspective
Cue music: “It’s the circle of life”
Why?
Because it amuses me. Next time I’ll make sure you are okay with me having fun before posting anything.
No way - this needs way more pixels…
…
to be removed. Like, I can still read the letters here and everything!?:-P
In reality, we are actually farming jpegs, by posting reencoded versions of them daily, until they all eventually decompose so we can merge with them.
Jokes on them, we’re going to put carbon into the atmosphere faster than they can process it raising the global temperature to the point of extinction
This is why I don’t eat edibles lol.
