How do you explain a lotus?

A flower lover does not like the Phactor's "analytical" approach to fabulous flowers. How sad.
A lotus flowers in my garden pond, and no lovelier flower exists on Earth. No wonder the lotus has figured so prominently in Eastern art and religions. In addition to its beauty a great many things are known about this flower. The lotus is very distinct from and not even closely related to the water lilies that bloomed in the same pond earlier in the summer. The lotus flower functions to interact with pollinators producing a most unusual fruit containing its seeds. The 135 million year history of flowers and their evolution into a myriad of forms is a marvelous story, and waterlilies, not lotuses, are a remnant of that very ancient stock from which today’s diversity of flowers sprang forth.
This flower lover wants to know why botanists such as the Phactor cannot just appreciate flowers like the lotus for what it is without dissecting it and taking it apart. Can’t we just look at it and say it’s beautiful and leave well enough alone? Well, no. That just isn’t good enough. For one thing, curiosity demands looking deeper. Although the lotus and waterlily look much alike in a very general way, they have many obvious differences, and botanists want to know why both similarities and differences exist. While both lotus and waterlily flowers are very pretty that information doesn’t answer any questions, and even that leaves the Phactor wondering why the aesthetic senses of humans are tuned to interpret some flowers as pretty when they are adapted by natural selection to attract certain insect or bird pollinators. The failure to appreciate the aesthetics of flowers is a symptom of clinical depression, so certainly looking beyond the shallow it’s-a-pretty-flower-and-you-don’t-need-to-know-anything-else perspective is warranted on both sides of the human-flower equation.
This brings the Phactor to a last point, a very important point, detailed knowledge of and an in depth understanding of a flower, of a lotus, in no way diminishes my aesthetic appreciation of the flower. And why would it? Do Civil War historians have a diminished appreciation of the valor of the soldiers because they know of the impact of many mistakes, miscommunications, and chance events had on the outcome of events? Does a painting have any less impact on art historians because they know about the palette, brushes, and personal woes of the painter? Ah, but historians are students of the subject they love and admire, and the unidimensional flower lover is not.
In return the Phactor wants to know what kind of mind, what kind of intellect is it that doesn’t want to know any more or isn’t curious about natural things? What is such a mind afraid of? What kind of intellect settles for the simplest and most banal of explanations (it was created that way)? In most cases in my experience they are worried that a quest for knowledge will gore a very sacred cow, their religion. How truly sad. Especially in biology where literally each and every time biologists have pursued a detailed course of study, the results, the understanding acquired, are quite at odds with religion. But a lotus, which isn’t even mentioned in the Bible, by any other name, would still grow from the navel of Narayana, and its leaf would still carry Kamadwa down the Ganges. And the saddest thing of all is a wasted intellect.

Be a good example

You get to observe many sorts while traveling, and here in western North Carolina where we find ourselves this weekend, you do get to see a different cross section of the country. While availing ourselves of a mom and pop motel's pool a couple of women old enough to know better were making quite a fuss, squeeling, eeking and such. And of this alarms their children, who were not old enough to know better. The cause of it all was a poor little ole tree frog who somehow landed itself in the pool with no apparent way out. Now this is a tiny frog, and it was easily removed and returned to the landscape shrubbery, but what kind of lesson did these women provide their children? Not a very good one. Be scared of encounters with nature. Turn a potential learning, caring for wildlife opportunity into the exact opposite. Depressing.

Primate Brain and Snakes

Deep down in the ancestral primate brain lurks an innate fear of snakes. Something rustles in the dry grass next to where you are standing; you startle and jump away ready to flee. The reason is fairly simple the instinctively jumpy primate lives to have more offspring than the curious one who looks to see what made the rustling noise, and then the curious ones become biologists. So it comes as no surprise that even at a very young age, 3 years old, humans readily notice snakes. This is great to know, but unfortunately my students are 20-something years old (they only act like 3 yr olds) and not only have they not learned all that much, but their basic instincts seem to have been blunted as well, so my worry continues. The illustration at the link shows a nicely coiled, hood-flaired cobra against a white back ground, and who would wonder about the human ability to notice that. The real world isn't so nice, and where my research is done the snakes are really, really a lot harder to spot. Here's a nice fer-de-lance in its typical understory habitat, right under one of my study trees, and it's one heck of a lot harder to see, even for a 3-year old. Hint: the head is almost dead center at the bottom of the picture looking to your left. Can you say camouflaged?

Resource use and human nature

Having discovered him during my college years (yes, the Phactor was a student of the 60s), Garrett Hardin remains one of my favorite essayists. He always clearly saw the problem: human nature. One of his more influential and insightful essays, “The tragedy of the commons” (1968) pretty well explained why an ever increasing human population is destroying the commons: over fishing the seas, over harvesting the forests, over tilling the soil, over pumping/diverting the water, over polluting everything, etc.

So how to subvert basic human nature? Well, ask a psychologist, of course! Barry Schwartz writes a very thoughtful article, “Tyranny for the commons man”, on this subject that is well worth reading.

Appreciation of flowers

The Phactor was thinking how it’s rather a nice thing to like flowers, and how apparently this is not so new. This came to mind when I found some nice concrete examples of floral imagery, as illustrated by this bas relief from Central Park NYC. The second image is from the archeological ruins of Troy. Other than the wear and tear of millennia, they are quite similar, and I quite doubt that any bits of NYC will look so good so many years after getting sacked by the Greeks. (New Yorkers: Be careful what gifts you accept.)

We humans so love the way flowers look that we decorate our properties, celebrate special events, declare our affections with flowers, and decorate with them at births, marriages, and deaths. Our connection to flowers is so ingrained in our psyche that the failure to appreciate their aesthetics is a sign of clinical depression. (Oh, dear what if you don't like this?) Apparently the human appreciation of flowers is nothing new. Pollen from bundles of flowers found in Neanderthal graves shows that honoring people in death has not changed very much over the past 150,000 years.


So what kinds of flowers are they? Any ideas?