The Triumph of Seeds

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about seeds from trees. How did they evolve? How did they flourish? What causes them to be like they are?

🎨 Impressions

A very cool book about things taken for granted. It reminds me of the story of the physicists who declared that all multi-cell life has some form of immune system that was quickly shut down by the biologist who pointed at trees. (Not an exact quote but the point stands.) I liked the deep dive into the causes of trees and some of the stories that came from it. Also, I quite enjoyed the mini-story of the rodents and their success.

I have more respect for nature and how it drives the world, regardless of how we behave. Also, the complexities that evolve. Also, I found it interesting that trees used to have some sort of spores instead of seeds, quite fascinating.

✍️ My Top Quotes

But it is true in one more respect: natural selection, like commerce, rewards a good product. The best adaptations spread through time and space, in turn spurring further innovation in a process Richard Dawkins aptly called, “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
They anchor life in the wild, too: seed plants now make up more than 90 percent of our flora. They are so commonplace it’s hard to imagine that for over 100 million years other types of plant life dominated the earth.
I recognized it as a fer-de-lance, a snake famed throughout Central America for its unfortunate combination of strong venom and a short temper. In this individual’s defense, however, I must confess that I had been poking it with a stick.
With her “baby in a box” analogy, Carol neatly captured the essence of seeds: portable, protected, and well-nourished.
A seed contains three basic elements: the embryo of a plant (the baby), a seed coat (the box), and some kind of nutritive tissue (the lunch).
Technically, germination refers only to that instant of awakening between water uptake and the first cell expansion, but most people use the term more broadly.
For avocados, that stored food includes everything from starch and protein to fatty oils and pure sugar—a mixture so rich that nurseries don’t even bother with fertilizers until well beyond the seedling stage.
They contained grass, too—a tall, Middle Eastern species in the genus Triticum that we know by the name of wheat.
Even Antarctica boasts native grasses, and if you lined up all the flowering plants on earth, nearly one in twenty would be a grass.
It wasn’t the type of food that mattered, but how it was prepared. “I became convinced that we cannot survive in the wild on raw food. As a species, we are entirely dependent on using fire for food preparation. We are the cooking ape.”
He told me about the remarkable energy gain achieved through cooking—how roasting or boiling meats, nuts, tubers, and other primate foods increased digestibility by anywhere from a third for wheat and oats to as much as 78 percent for a chicken egg.
People near the Sea of Galilee were using stone tools to grind and process wild barley over 20,000 years ago, and in Mozambique, similar methods put sorghum on the menu 105,000 years ago.
Rome first saw Egyptian production diverted to Constantinople, and then lost the rest of its supplies when Carthage fell to the Vandals. Prices skyrocketed, and major food riots and famines rocked the capital at least fourteen times in the fourth and fifth centuries.
After all, the average rat travels only a few hundred yards from its birthplace over the course of a lifetime, so how did the illness move from China to India and the Middle East and all the way north to Scandinavia in a matter of years? The answer lies not in the ranging habits of rats, but in their diet. While black rats will eat almost anything, they thrive on grain of all types and travel with it wherever it goes.
God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them. —German Proverb
And while it’s tempting to chalk up Almond Joys to the same logic that Benjamin Franklin used for beer—“proof that God loves us”
The term fracking refers to an oil and natural gas extraction process known in the industry by its full name, hydraulic fracturing.
Like any other new adaptation, seeds began as an oddity, bit players in a much larger drama. They appeared in the first years of the Carboniferous Period (360–286 million years ago), a time when most plants reproduced by spores.
“Never argue with a fool—an onlooker can’t tell the difference.”
Selecting plants with edible side buds and flower shoots produced Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli, while nurturing a fattened stem produced kohlrabi.
Assyrians began meticulously hand-pollinating date palms more than 4,000 years ago, and as early as the Shang Dynasty (1766–1122 BC), Chinese winemakers had perfected a strain of millet that required protection from cross-pollination
Mende people of Sierra Leone, whose verb for “experiment” comes from the phrase “trying out new rice.”
Because while they may live in the tropics and grow 150 feet tall, almendro trees also belong to the pea family and come festooned with purple flowers.
If Silva returned today, he could take a cable car to the top, and he would find the phrase “Masada Shall Not Fall Again” emblazoned on everything from t-shirts to coffee mugs.
Over time, most plants developed the habit of holding onto their seeds longer and drying them out, reducing water content by as much as 95 percent. This remains the single most important factor in slowing down a seed’s metabolism,
The name “rodent” comes from the Latin verb rodere, “to gnaw,” a reference both to the way rodents chew and to the massive incisors that help them do it so well.
For rodents, unlocking the nutrition in seeds turned out to be an evolutionary gold mine: they quickly became the most numerous and diverse group of mammals on the planet.
On the second voyage, he found every member of his new colony on Hispaniola murdered by natives.
Manage that feat. History remembers Columbus for his epoch-making first trip across the Atlantic and for helping usher in a new era of exploration and conquest. But people often gloss over the fact that he returned to the New World three more times, searching in vain for spices, gold, or other valuable commodities. On the second voyage, he found every member of his new colony on Hispaniola murdered by natives.
Dried and ground or added whole, the fruits and seeds of Capsicum chili peppers now flavor everything from Thai curries to Hungarian goulash to African groundnut stew. From four wild species native to the New World, over 2,000 cultivars have been developed, ranging in spiciness from the mildest paprika to the fieriest habañero and beyond. (Bell peppers also come from this stock, but are bred for size and sweetness instead of pungency
Nutmeg and mace both come from a tree native to Indonesia. Nutmeg is the seed itself, while mace grows as a fleshy red seed appendage called the aril.
Dutch plantations on Java dominated the world market so completely that the word java would soon become synonymous with the drink itself.
Whenever I fragrant coffee drink, I on the generous Frenchman think, Whose noble perseverance bore, The tree to Martinico’s shore
That fondness has transformed the seeds of a shrubby African tree into the world’s second most traded commodity. Only oil futures generate more annual revenue.
Before the advent of coffee, “beer soup” was the morning staple. The standard recipe featured steaming-hot ale poured over bread or mush, with eggs, butter, cheese, or sugar added on special occasions. This concoction provided people of all ages with carbohydrates, calories, and, although the beer was usually weak, a modest buzz.
As late as the seventeenth century, when coffee began to take hold, per capita beer consumption in northern Europe ranged from 156 to as much as 700 liters annually, with 300 to 400 liters considered average. Modern figures pale by comparison—Americans drink a paltry 78 liters per year, the British put away 74, and even the beer-loving Germans knock back only 107.
Coffee beans contain at least 800 other compounds in addition to caffeine—making that daily cup, by some accounts, the most chemically complex food in the human diet.
Named warfarin after the group that funded the research (the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation), this modified coumarin quickly became the most widely used rat poison in the world. Mixed in with a tempting food bait, it kills rodents by causing anemia, hemorrhaging, and uncontrollable internal bleeding. But in people, a small dose thins the blood just enough to prevent dangerous clots inside the veins, one of the most common and deadly side effects of cancer and its treatment. Sold under the trade name Coumadin, a warfarin prescription often goes hand in hand with chemotherapy, particularly when the cancer spreads widely,
Before the seeds ripen, plants keep animals at bay with fruit that is bitter or downright poisonous.
The technical term for fruit dispersal is endozoochory, which would sound far more elegant if everyone still spoke ancient Greek: “going abroad within animals.”
That most gruesome third leg of the Atlantic trade triangle surged to a new peak in the 1790s, when as many as 87,000 slaves crossed the Middle Passage to America every year.
Things worked out fine for Eli Whitney, too. His cotton-gin patent expired, still worthless, but he went on to make a fortune in a different industry—the manufacture of muskets, rifles, and pistols. Ironically, weapons from the Whitney Armory were among the most common firearms used in the Civil War.