The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world by Michael Pollan Page B

sure exactly what to make of the African case, and neither is Goody. Could it mean that the beauty of flowers is in fact in the eye of the beholder—is something people have constructed, like the sublimity of mountains or the spiritual lift we feel in a forest? If so, why did so many different peoples invent it in so many different times and places? More likely, the African case is simply the exception that proves the rule. As Goody points out, Africans quickly adopted a culture of flowers wherever others introduced it. Maybe the love of flowers is a predilection all people share, but it’s one that cannot itself flower until conditions are ripe—until there are lots of flowers around and enough leisure to stop and smell them.
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    Let’s say we are born with such a predisposition—that humans, like bees, are drawn instinctively to flowers. It’s obvious what good it does bees to be born liking flowers, but what conceivable benefit could such a predilection offer people?
    Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed an interesting answer. Their hypothesis can’t be proven, at least not until scientists begin to identify genes for human preferences, but it goes like this: Our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth. The presence of flowers, as even I understood as a boy, is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers, and who further could distinguish among them and then remember where in the landscape they’d seen them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance. According to the neuroscientist Steven Pinker, who outlines this theory in How the Mind Works, natural selection was bound to favor those among our ancestors who noticed flowers and had a gift for botanizing—for recognizing plants, classifying them, and then remembering where they grow. In time the moment of recognition—much like the quickening one feels whenever an object of desire is spotted in the landscape—would become pleasurable, and the signifying thing a thing of beauty.
    But wouldn’t it make more sense if people were simply hardwired to recognize fruit itself, forget the flowers? Perhaps, but recognizing and recalling flowers helps a forager get to fruit first, before the competition. Because I know exactly where on my road the blackberry canes flowered last month, I stand a much better chance of getting to the berries this month before anyone else or any birds do.
    I probably should mention at this point that these last speculations are mine, not any scientist’s. But I do wonder if it isn’t significant that our experience of flowers is so deeply drenched in our sense of time. Maybe there’s a good reason we find their fleetingness so piercing, can scarcely look at a flower in bloom without thinking ahead, whether in hope or regret. We might share with certain insects a tropism inclining us toward flowers, but presumably insects can look at a blossom without entertaining thoughts of the past and future—complicated human thoughts that may once have been anything but idle. Flowers have always had important things to teach us about time.
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    This is all pure speculation, I know—though speculation itself sometimes seems part and parcel of what a flower is. I’m not sure if they ever asked for it, but flowers have always borne the often absurd weight of our meaning-making, so much so that I’m not prepared to say they don’t ask for it. Consider, after all, that signifying is precisely what natural selection has designed flowers to do. They were nature’s tropes long before we came along.
    Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals. In order to achieve