Susan Grant
Current biological thinking sees mutualisms and antagonisms alike as the outcome of chance association, fine-tuned by evolution. Beauty and the Beast, The Convolution of Plants and Animals, 1984.
Dr. Grant: Ph. D. in Zoology; teacher of Biological Sciences at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts. She has published articles in a number of scientific journals.
Like the aristocratic girls of ancient China whose feet were bound and crushed in childhood, cultivars are for the most part helpless dependents on the society that made them what they are. Ibid.
The genetic diversity that allows a species to evolve in a changing world is most easily attained by outbreeding. Ibid.
Flowering plants that depend on animal aid in pollination achieve sexual reproduction through what might be called artificial insemination by donor. Ibid.
Pollen-producing plants are grouped by botanists into two categories, the gymnosperms (naked seeds) and the angiosperms (covered seeds). Ibid.
Food , in liquid or solid form, is a bribe that many flowers have evolved to secure pollinator services. Ibid.
In the biology of symbiosis, it seems likely that the plants involved will ultimately need their beasts just as much as the beasts need them, and that their long-term partnership will become for both the central fact of life. Ibid.