The Triumph of Seeds
Read The Triumph of Seeds Online
Authors: Thor Hanson
Tags: #Nature, #Plants, #General, #Gardening, #Reference, #Natural Resources
THE TRIUMPH OF SEEDS
ALSO BY THOR HANSON
Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle
The Impenetrable Forest: Gorilla Years in Uganda
Copyright © 2015 by Thor Hanson
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.
All art reproduced in this book is either in the public domain or used with permission.
Some material in this book has been reprinted from previously published works. The quotation from
The Carrot Seed
by Ruth Krauss (1945) is used by permission of HarperCollins. Quotations from
The Botany of Desire
by Michael Pollan (2001) and from
Tastes of Paradise
by Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1992) are used by permission of Random House. The quotation from
Empires of Food
by Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas (2010) is used with the permission of Simon & Schuster. Quotations from
Guns, Germs, and Steel
by Jared Diamond (1999) and from
A River Lost
by Blaine Harden (1996) are used by permission of W. W. Norton.
Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail
[email protected]
.
Designed by Trish Wilkinson
Set in 10.5 point Goudy Oldstyle Std
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hanson, Thor, author.
The triumph of seeds : how grains, nuts, kernels, pulses, and pips, conquered the plant kingdom and shaped human history / Thor Hanson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-04872-4 (e-book) 1. Seeds. I. Title.
QK661.H36 2015
581.4’67—dc23
2014047078
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Eliza and Noah
Contents
INTRODUCTION
The Fierce Energy
CHAPTER ONE
Seed for a Day
CHAPTER TWO
The Staff of Life
CHAPTER THREE
Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut
CHAPTER FOUR
What the Spike Moss Knows
CHAPTER FIVE
Mendel’s Spores
CHAPTER SIX
Methuselah
CHAPTER SEVEN
Take It to the Bank
CHAPTER EIGHT
By Tooth, Beak, and Gnaw
CHAPTER NINE
The Riches of Taste
CHAPTER TEN
The Cheeriest Beans
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Death by Umbrella
CHAPTER TWELVE
Irresistible Flesh
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By Wind and Wave
CONCLUSION
The Future of Seeds
Appendix A: Common and Scientific Names
T
hroughout this book I have chosen to stick with a functional definition of seeds, acknowledging that in some cases the seed-like part of a plant might also include tissues derived from the fruit (e.g., the shell of a nut). The text includes only common names of plants, but a complete list of all Latin binomials is included in
Appendix A
. I’ve tried to keep botanical jargon to an absolute minimum, or explain it with context, but have also compiled a short glossary (also at the back of the book). Finally, I encourage readers not to neglect the notes for each chapter. They include a wealth of juicy seed lore that couldn’t be squeezed into the narrative, but was too good to leave out entirely.
I
n writing this book I have relied on the help and patience of a huge range of generous people. Here, in no particular order, is a partial list of those who have given assistance along the way—granting interviews, loaning books and papers, answering questions, and even pitching in with some timely babysitting: Carol and Jerry Baskin, Christina Walters, Robert Haggerty, Bill DiMichele, Fred Johnson, John Deutch, Derek Bewley, Patrick Kirby, Richard Wrangham, Sam White, Michael Black, Chris Looney, Ole J. Benedictow, Micaela Colley, Amy Grondin, John Navazio, Matthew Dillon, Sarah Shallon, Elaine Solowey, Hugh Pritchard, Howard Falcon-Lang, Matt Stimson, Scott Elrick, Stanislav Opluštil, Bob Sievers, Phil Cox, Robert Druzinsky, Greg Adler, David Strait, Judy Chupasko, Diane Ott Whealy, Sophie Rouys, Pam Stuller, Noelle Machnicki, Chelsey Walker-Watson, Brandon Paul Weaver, Hiroshi Ashihara, Jeri Wright, Ronald Griffiths, Chifumi Nagai, Steve Meredith, David Newman, Richard Cummings, Giovanni Giustina, Jason Werden, Erin Braybrook, the International Spy Museum, Valéria Forni Martins, Mark Stout, Al and Nellie Habegger, Thomas Boghardt, Ira Pastan, Kirsten Gallaher, Uno Eliasson, Jonathan Wendel, Duncan Porter, Charles Moseley, Boyd Pratt, Bella French, Paul Hanson, Aaron Burmeister, Nason and Erica Hamlin,
John Dickie, Suzanne Olive, Amy Stewart, Derek and Susan Arndt, Kathleen Ballard, and Chris Weaver.
I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for granting me a fellowship specifically in support of the writing of this book. The Leon Levy Foundation also contributed generously to that fellowship.
Special thanks for help with research go to the University of Idaho Library and to the San Juan Island Library, with particular appreciation for the patience and diligence of Interlibrary Loan Coordinator Heidi Lewis.
I’m grateful for the talents and enthusiasm of my agent, Laura Blake Peterson, and all her colleagues at Curtis Brown, and it has once again been a true pleasure to work with TJ Kelleher and the superlative team at Basic Books and Perseus, including (but not limited to) Sandra Beris, Cassie Nelson, Clay Farr, Michele Jacob, Trish Wilkinson, Nicole Jarvis, and Nicole Caputo.
Finally, none of this would be possible, or particularly enjoyable, without the love and support of my friends and family.
Sir, I can nothing say,
But that I am your most obedient servant.
—William Shakespeare,
All’s Well That Ends Well
(c. 1605)
C
harles Darwin traveled with the HMS
Beagle
for five years, devoted eight years to the anatomy of barnacles, and spent most of his adult life ruminating on the implications of natural selection. The famed naturalist-monk Gregor Mendel hand-pollinated 10,000 pea plants over the course of eight Moravian springtimes, before finally writing up his thoughts on inheritance. At Olduvai Gorge, two generations of the Leaky family sifted through sand and rock for decades to piece together a handful of critical fossils. Unraveling evolutionary mysteries is generally hard work, the stuff of long careers spent in careful thought and observation. But some stories are obvious, crystal clear from the very beginning. Anyone familiar with children, for example, understands the origin of punctuation. It started with the exclamation point.
Nothing comes more naturally to a toddler than emphatic, imperative verbs. In fact, any word can be transformed into a command with the right inflection—a gleeful, insistent shout accented from a seemingly bottomless quiver of exclamation points. Whatever nuances of speech and prose might be gained by the use of comma, period, or semicolon clearly developed later. The exclamation point is innate.
Our son, Noah, is a good example. He began his verbal career with many of the expected phrases, from “Move!” and “More!” to the always-popular “No!” But his early vocabulary also reflected a more unusual interest: Noah was obsessed with seeds. Neither Eliza nor I can remember exactly when this passion began; it just seemed that he had always loved them. Whether speckling the skin of a strawberry, scooped from inside a squash, or chewed up in the rose hips he plucked from roadside shrubs, any seed that Noah encountered was worthy of attention and comment. In fact, determining which things had seeds, and which didn’t, became one of the first ways he learned to order his world. Pinecone? Seeds. Tomato? Seeds. Apple, avocado, sesame bagel? All with seeds. Raccoon? No seeds.
With such conversations a regular occurrence in our household, it’s no wonder that seeds were on my short list when it was time to settle on a new book idea. What might have tipped the balance was Noah’s pronunciation, which added a certain imperative to his botanical observations. Sibilance did not come easily to his young tongue, but instead of lisping he chose to replace ‘s’ sounds with a hard ‘h.’ The result was a barrage of double commands—every time he disassembled some unsuspecting piece of fruit he would raise the seeds in my direction and shout, “HEED!” Day after day, this scene repeated itself until I eventually got the message: I heeded the seeds. After all, little Noah had already pretty much taken over the rest of our lives. Why not put him in charge of career decisions, too?
Fortunately, he assigned me a topic dear to my heart, a book that I’d wanted to write for years. As a doctoral student, my research included studies of seed dispersal and seed predation in huge tropical
rainforest trees. I learned how vital those seeds were, not just to the trees but to the bats and monkeys that dispersed them; the parrots, rodents, and peccaries that ate them; the jaguars that hunted the peccaries; and so on. Researching seeds enriched my understanding of biology, but it also taught me how their influence reaches far beyond the edge of forest or field; seeds are vital everywhere. They transcend that imaginary boundary we erect between the natural world and the human world, appearing so regularly in our daily lives, in so many forms, that we hardly recognize how utterly dependent we are upon them. Telling their story reminds us of our fundamental connections to nature—to plants, animals, soil, seasons, and the process of evolution itself. And in an age where, for the first time, more than half the human population lives in cities, reaffirming those links has never been more important.
Before this tale travels even another paragraph, however, I need to insert two caveats. The first is an important clarification that will preserve good relations with my many friends in marine biology. In the 1962 film
Mutiny on the Bounty
, there is a memorable scene where the rebellious sailors set Captain Bligh adrift in a longboat and then immediately toss every one of his hated
breadfruit seedlings overboard. (Bligh had been giving the plants regular doses of fresh water even after the crew’s rations ran low.) As the little trees go over the side of the ship, the camera pans back to show them trailing in the
Bounty
’s wake: a handful of pitiful green motes on a vast, calm sea. Their prospects look dim, making an important point about the limitations of the seed strategy. While seed plants may triumph on dry land, different rules apply to the nearly three-quarters of the planet covered by oceans. There, algae and tiny phytoplankton hold sway, limiting their seed-bearing cousins to a few shallow-water varieties, the occasional bobbing coconut, and things cast off by sailors. Seeds evolved on terra firma, where their many remarkable traits have shaped the course of natural and human history. But it’s good to keep in mind that on the open ocean, they’re still a novelty act.