Evolution Diary

Found this interesting video about evolution of plants.

Author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan delivers this Avenali Lecture on the stories of four familiar plant species: the apple,the tulip, the potato, and cannabis.

He touches on the way plants use ingeniously diverse methods of evolution for controlling animals chemically through the animal’s desires, and talks about Andrew Weil’s ‘4th drive’ of humans to change consciousness, the evoltuionary benefits of various altered states (such as the neurological necessity of short-term and long-term forgeting) and manifold other enthusiastic speculations.

The even is part of the “Avenali Lecture” held at Berkeley.

You can also download a copy of his published papers on similar subjects at the below link

Cannabis, Forgetting and the Botany of Desire