(EN) INTEGRATION, CITATION, VARIATION AND INVENTION
Integration, Citation, Variation and Inventionby Anna Straube
“Text signifies material”, says the Great Semiotician
“but while in the past, this material has always been understood as a product, a finished veil behind which – more or less concealed – the meaning (the truth) may be found, now we emphasise the generative idea in connection with material, the notion that the text emerges as the result of continuous weaving, of working on itself.”
Botanical Turn*
Examples:
[1] I study botany.
Antonyms:
[1] zoology (study of animals), microbiology
Expressions:
[1] a romp amidst the botany
*
1. biologies
The nature of life, of being-alive, has been an enigma since the very beginning of philosophy.
The Great Philosopher attempted to solve this by simply ignoring the fact of “being-alive”. He maintained that an organism was no more than a machine.
Nature functioned like a well-oiled machine, and living creatures formed a chain of being from the monads to the angels.
What is life? Why is a plant alive - in what way can plants be distinguished from dead matter?
Flower buds are open when the sun shines, closed at night and when it is raining.
In the middle of the 20th century, man finally arrived at some clarity in such questions. Firstly, it became obvious that the solution could never be found by a philosopher with no background in biology.
Plants come into being of their own accord, from seeds or parts of the mother plant.
The evolutionary biologist attempts to give answers to the questions “why”. Generally speaking, experiments are not suitable means by which to answer questions about evolution. We cannot carry out experiments about the extinction of the dinosaurs, or the evolution of man.
If a boundary were to be drawn between the natural sciences and the humanities, it would go right through the middle of biology.
Actually, the subject ought to be called “zoology”, because the Greek word “zoe” refers to organic life (not only of animals), while “bios” means the specific form of human life. In Greek antiquity, the “biologos” was not a scientist but an actor, who represented human life.
Determinism is another principle that is not suited to biology.
In fact, blind coincidence produces the variations.
Precisely this coincidental quality of variation is so characteristic of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. And yet the relative significance of coincidence in the evolutionary process is still very controversial, even today.
The Spartan Hyacinthos, beloved of Apollo, was transformed into a flower of the same name. Narcissus met with the same destiny.
The Heliads, the daughters of the sun, became black poplars shedding tears of electron (amber).
2. researches
They were collected by root diggers.
They were collected in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries by plant hunters, brought to Europe and cultivated and researched in botanical gardens.
The flow of juices was examined, the water balance was studied, and people arrived at the insight that salts play an important part in the nutrition of plants.
The microscope was developed into a useful aid to research.
He saw nerves, patches, and simple and star-shaped hairs on plant leaves.
It was a matter of distinguishing between the significant and the insignificant, and of setting his individual observations into a logical context.
He attributed a particular importance to the pith of the stems, saw fibres contained in this pith, and differentiated three types: single fibres, screw-shaped fibres and sap ducts in the bast. He described the development of wood and the arrangement and forms of stoma; the term parenchyma originated from him.
He investigated sap channels in bark. He analysed the inner structure of roots and the germination process of grasses.
Users of the microscope made abstract drawings of small and even miniscule things and tried to assemble these into an overall picture.
At the end of this research phase, it had been established that plant matter consisted of two types:
the basic, juicy tissue composed of chambers (= cells), and the extended fibres.
He saw that the ducts were joined into bundles and that these could be distinguished clearly from the parenchyma. He macerated firm tissue by decaying it in water, and crushed or squashed the remains so that he could thus examine structural elements in isolation.
Interest was no longer focused exclusively on the anatomy of fully developed matter; its development also became an object of study.
The number of scientific publications snowballed.
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3. categories
There have always been considerable efforts to establish a classification of the plant world.
One reason for this is that scarcely anyone is aware of all the plant species of a (limited) area.
Plant names are linked to individual specimens, deposited in herbariums. This process actually amounts to a nomenclatorial trick, for as a rule it is not possible to register the range of variability within a species.
The scientific names of all the taxonomic groups are taken from either Latin or Greek. If they come from other languages, they have to be treated like Latin names.
What is a department, what is a group? The group of algae – in the systematic sense – does not exist.
Today, scientists agree that a species can be considered as a reproductive community that differs discretely from a related species. The subsuming of species to superordinate, hierarchic groups (taxa) is usually far more difficult to explain.
• the leaves, known as fronds, are rolled up characteristically in the early stage of development; they can be up to 1 metre in length.
• the fronds are usually feathered once or several times.
• in many species, the fronds are arranged in a circle and form a funnel.
• reproduction usually takes place through spores, which are formed in a specific way on the underside of the fronds.
The last word on mosses has not yet been spoken.
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4. communities
According to the Great Plant Sociologist, plants do not live in isolation; they are socialised with other species.
a) Units of the Euro-Siberian / Boreo-American Region
1. Aquatic lentic communities
6. Sand-dune communities
9. Root crop and ruderal communities
14. Mire communities
16. Swamp communities
17. Hardy communities
20. Perennial sand communities
27. Montane communities
28. Calcicolous grassland communities
31. Mesotrophic grassland communities
36. Waterside grassland communities
During the 20th century, biologists created a hierarchic system, the basic unit of which was association.
*
5. systems
The spatial proximity of two organisms promotes the development of mutually influencing mechanisms.
But ecological science has also built its house on metaphors.
In ecological science, plants live together peacefully in communities, and together they form super-organisms.
The individual elements necessary for the construction of living systems are considered stable. The only thing that changes is their distribution.
All such changes can be subsumed under the term cyclic processes (cycles).
Thereby, as a rule, the behaviour of individuals or individual types is not taken into account.
And the cycle is not round.
We all know that a system is more than just the sum of the activities of its elements.
That means that a researcher may use his discretion when deciding to refer to something as an ecological system.
Actually, only an extremely tiny proportion of the material existing on Earth is in motion, and even less contributes to the development of living systems.
97 percent of the water is contained in the oceans, and only three percent is fresh water. In turn, three-quarters of this is immobilised, as ice in the polar caps and glaciers. The water that is available for plants amounts to under 0.001 percent.
The oxygen content of the atmosphere is almost exclusively dependent on the photosynthetic activity of green plants.
The life-span of marine organisms is measured in weeks; that of terrestrial organisms in years.
In some places, fishes that are larger than human beings are attributed to the world of spirits rather than being viewed as aquatic animals.
Bowhead whales can live to be more than 200 years old, and are thus regarded as the longest-living vertebrates.
In the North Atlantic, the species was thought to be completely extinct at the beginning of the 20th century, but a small population appears to have survived here, too. It is beginning to grow again.
After the ice receded, the land was resettled from the South.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that the limits of ecological pollution have been reached, often even exceeded.
There is a capacity limit, and when this is exceeded, the system either fails to return to its original, initial state or it is even irreversibly destroyed (periodic catastrophe).
Initially, complex systems can bear a great deal.
Destruction cannot be reversed; once destroyed, a tropical rainforest or a coral reef is lost for ever.
Many students only study biology because they are interested in conservation issues, but most of them experience disappointments.
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6. movements
By contrast to most animal organisms, all multi-cellular and many single-cell plants are immobile.
Plant development is controlled - far more than animal development - by means of external signals or factors. For example, a seed only germinates when the external conditions are favourable.
The plant must react to an entire complex of factors, whereby individual factors have either an additive or a multiplicative impact on its growth.
The most important factor regulating growth is light.
Plants are characterised by terminal growth. Only the undifferentiated cells at the plant tip divide; all the others are dormant.
Growing and fully-developed shoots are divided into nodes and the sections between them. At the tip of a growing sprout there is a terminal bud with a vegetation point.
But side buds sometimes metamorphose into offshoots or rhizomes – shoots that continue in a horizontal direction below ground.
A rhizome can be interrupted or severed at any point; it will nonetheless continue along its own or other lines, according to the Great Post-modern Philosophers. And every point of a rhizome can (and must) be connected to every other one.
The principle of connection and heterogeneity. The principle of multiplicity. The principle of the asigificant break. The principle of cartography and the picture transfer.
Rhizomes continue to grow indefinitely at the tip, throughout several vegetation periods; the older parts gradually die.
Growth can be described as an irreversible increase in volume.
that means
for now, we go on living
none of the rotations has stopped
nor the infinite expansion
of space into nothingness
unnoticed,
molecule chains continue to grow
and to disintegrate
Biographical information:
Anna Straube *1983 in
Leipzig. Lives in Berlin.