Review of “The Botany of Desire”

Philip Ivanov
Nov 7 · 2 min read

Definitely worth reading. The author dives deep into the subject of coexistence and reciprocal cooperation of floral species with humanity and other species. The focus is on four plants, each appealing to one of the basic human desires — desire for sweetness, beauty, altered state of mind and control.

Right from the get go the book takes an aberration from general consensus that biological evolution is somewhat random and is arbitrated by the “survival of the fittest”. It doesn’t really contest the posit but presents another compelling idea — about plant intelligence and plants’ ability to deliberately (and consciously) manipulate other species (especially humans) by exploiting their desires and thus propagate themselves and advance on the evolutionary ladder.

The author, of course, is very well aware of the perennial reciprocal dynamics that occur between plants and other lifeforms — bees and flowers, for one. Flowers manufacture certain chemicals that attract the bees and the more potent the chemical is, the higher is the chance of pollination. Nonetheless bees do not cultivate the flowers or plants that they happen to like, humans, on the other hand do.

Once humans become fond of a particular plant there’s a great chance that this plant will be replicated and propagated on a planetary scale. This begs the question whether it is humans acting upon plants or plants acting upon humans. A few chapters into the book and the idea of plants possessing a certain form of consciousness and intelligence doesn’t seem too far fetched. By synthesizing certain chemicals, plants can kill other species, alter their DNA, cause mutations and among other things change the subjective experience of reality.

There are a lot of interesting questions raised by the book especially those of “why” — why a certain shape or form is more appealing to humans than other and how is it that billions of humans happen to share the same predilection. How do plants know which substances to manufacture in the flesh around their seeds in cases when they wish to be eaten and in cases when they do not.

Along with the questions the author shares his own analyses, for instance decomposing the notion of beauty to reveal how it works from an evolutionary perspective, why it exists, how it gets exploited by different species and most importantly how it emerged as a survival strategy.

Overall, the book contains a plethora of ideas, questions and observations (some are deep and profound) as well as numerous anecdotes and interesting historical facts all of which are worth spending a few minutes to mull over, even outside the context, altogether making Michael Pollan’s work even more appealing.

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