A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
Higher plants didn't exist alongside the first animals, they would have fed on what was abundant - bacterial slime mats. It's worth pointing out that photosynthetic algae have existed for over 3 billion years and were there before the organisms that ate them existed. The perfect match that we see between higher plants and the animals that consume them are the product of an evolutionary race of predation. That not only explains what we see in the world today, it explains what we see as the world changes.coemgen said:I’ve been thinking about this and some of what A_Wanderer said throughout the day. Then this an idea came to me and led me to do a little research. I found that up to 60 percent of the human body is water, the brain is composed of 70 percent water and the lungs are nearly 90 percent water. About 83 percent of our blood is water.
In comparison, most fruits and vegetables contain up to 90 percent water.
However, anyone can see when you compare the human body to a tomato, the differences are staggering.
Fruits and vegetables don't have brains, beating hearts, sex organs, an incredible feeling that comes with sex, the capacity to love, a built-in moral compass, the capacity to heal physically on their own, the ability to see, hear and feel, cognitive thought, the ability to move out of their own will, the ability to cry tears based on emotional feelings, the ability to laugh after emotional feelings, the ability to feel pain, the ability to have babies, the ability, for some of us, to breastfeed important nutrients to the baby (which many scientists say can't be reproduced), the ability to breath, and, among many other things, the ability to taste and enjoy, chew and swallow, digest and obtain necessary nutrients from, and poop and pee the left over stuff (probably largely water) from fruits and vegetables. A tomato is just a tomato (no matter how you say the freaking word).
Then, on top of it all, there's the questions as to why fruits and vegetables exist and how they're able to be grown from seed to the end result. It seems as if their existence and our existence together, and how one needs the other (or food in general) to exist, has something behind it other than chance.
I guess my point is this: I don't understand why asking "why" is any less important than asking "how." I would argue it's more important. If there is no reason to ask "why" then, really, there's not much of a reason to ask "how," ultimately. It's all chance, so so what. I then have as much value as a freaking tomato. (Which, I know can be used in everything from ketchup to salsa, so there’s hope for me.)
However, if there is a reason to ask "why," there has to be value in asking it . . . and discovering what the "why" is.
It’s been my experience that doing this reveals a “Who.”
The concept of chance is taken poorly because you don't use the idea of selection. Say that I have a bag containing one hundred marbles of many different colours and I pick them out into another bag, but as I do so I only select for red marbles. At the end you will only be left with red marbles in the second bag; and that was the product of chance and selection. So in an evolutionary context say that each marble represents a a variation and instead of you selecting it is whether the variant organism survives. After selection has taken place you will only be left with successful variants.
Asking why is based on the assumption that there is a why, you will need to fit the evidence to suit your paradigm; so instead of seeing a tomato as a means of seed dispersal and reproduction for a plant it becomes something more. Now I agree that tomatoes represent creation because they were, they were created by people through selective breeding (artificial selection) to be pallatable, large and of use. Different types of tomatoes that you buy at your grocery didn't just come from the wild.
The division between plants and animals goes way back in deep time; if you want to get into the messy connections then take a look at something like slime moulds - your examples of a modern tomato and a modern human are organisms billions of years removed by decent. The interactions between plants and animals however have been things that shape the evolutionary fitness of each and drive change.
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