The botany of desire
“Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as on our implication in the natural world.” —The New York Times “A wry, informed pastoral.” —The New Yorker The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in America Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?
Stats for nerds
21recommend
33mentions
30people
2008–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > It's like if *humans* went around making all of the important decisions and only bothered to spin up a *machine* briefly for reproductive purposes. But then the sex *bot* got a bit out of control and got a job and an apartment and now it's the humans who look like they're just for reproduction.
This perspective could kind of also apply to plants, a la The Botany of Desire (good book). From a certain plant's perspective, humans exist to help them reproduce.
- Referenced in the article, Michael Pollen's 2018 "How to Change Your Mind" book is wonderfully written [1]. I read this right after reading Gabriel Maté's "Chasing the Scream" [tl;dr: addiction is a mental problem, not judicial]. Pollen's level-headed approach to the silly topic of entheogen exploration reminded me that I am just a simple chemical meatbag.
Reading the article, I am reminded of my humanness.
[1] Check out Pollen's "Botany of Desire" about plants (THC included) controlling humans. IMHO it's the author's best title.
- Consider reading The Botany of Desire.
It doesn't need to experience an emotion of wanting in order to effectively want things. Corn doesn't experience a feeling of wanting, and yet it has manipulated us even into creating a lot of it, doing some serious damage to ourselves and our long-term prospects simply by being useful and appealing.
The blockchain doesn't experience wanting, yet it coerced us into burning country-scale amounts of energy to feed it.
LLMs are traveling the same path, persuading us to feed them ever more data and compute power. The fitness function may be computed in our meat brains, but make no mistake: they are the benefactors of survival-based evolution nonetheless.
- I love this paper! I first read it years ago in college. The Botany of Desire is also a great read if you're into the study of plants and civilization
- Sitting by my bed is a copy of Michael Pollan's book "The botany of desire" he discusses Johny Appleseed in depth well worth the read.
- Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan is a great book / documentary that explores this view.
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