Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.
Interpretation
Plants use chemical defenses to protect themselves from herbivores since they cannot move or react physically.
In this quote, Steven Pinker highlights how plants, unlike animals, lack the ability to escape or defend themselves through movement or behavior. As a result, they have evolved various chemical mechanisms, including toxins and irritants, to deter herbivores and protect themselves from being consumed, illustrating the complex interactions between plants and animals in nature.
In practice
In a discussion about botanical defenses at a gardening seminar.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Since oceans are the life support system of our planet, regulating the climate, providing most of our oxygen and feeding over a billion people, what's bad for oceans is bad for us - very bad.
Nature Cure is so simple easy and cheap.....this system of treatment should be used.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours be reckoned, but in herbs and flowers?
I will follow my instincts, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot.
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
Sometimes I feel like I’m actually on the wrong planet. It’s great when I’m in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?
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