## Metadata - Author: [[Peter Godfrey-Smith]] - Full Title: Living on Earth - Category: #books ## Highlights - In the early history of the transformation of environments by living organisms, effects were mostly achieved by producing and modifying chemicals. Sometimes, as with plants and rivers, organisms had effects through their growth and form. Another stage in this story is the evolution of action: behavior, controlled movement of the body. ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CSBNY9L3&location=704)) - Flowers are made to be seen or smelled, made to be drunk from, made to attract insects and other animals. They are not just made to be perceived, but made to appeal. Attracting insects, birds, and bats allows flowering plants to interact, plant to plant, over long distances. The previous chapter noted how these plant-plant interactions are routed through the behaviors and nervous systems of animals; they are also routed through those animals’ values and goals. Forests of flowering plants depend on the interaction of displays and evaluation. Thor Hanson, in his book Buzz, contrasts forest scenes of a typical kind with the vegetation on the Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile. These islands are, and have long been, almost completely without bees. As a result, the flowers are mostly small, greenish-white, and lacking the symmetrical displays of petals that bee-visited flowers tend to have. I said back in chapter 3 that to imagine an early flower, one might picture a magnolia. We should picture it also as white. Magnolias evolved before bees did, and they evolved to be fertilized by beetles. Multicolor clusters of flowers, especially blue and yellow, came with bees. (According to Hanson, most bees can’t see the color red; that is a bird-attracting color.) ([Location 1239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CSBNY9L3&location=1239)) - Flowers are made to be seen or smelled, made to be drunk from, made to attract insects and other animals. They are not just made to be perceived, but made to appeal. Attracting insects, birds, and bats allows flowering plants to interact, plant to plant, over long distances. The previous chapter noted how these plant- plant interactions are routed through the behaviors and nervous systems of animals; they are also routed through those animals’ values and goals. Forests of flowering plants depend on the interaction of displays and evaluation. Thor Hanson, in his book Buzz, contrasts forest scenes of a typical kind with the vegetation on the Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile. These islands are, and have long been, almost completely without bees. As a result, the flowers are mostly small, greenish-white, and lacking the symmetrical displays of petals that bee-visited flowers tend to have. I said back in chapter 3 that to imagine an early flower, one might picture a magnolia. We should picture it also as white. Magnolias evolved before bees did, and they evolved to be fertilized by beetles. Multicolor clusters of flowers, especially blue and yellow, came with bees. (According to Hanson, most bees can’t see the color red; that is a bird-attracting color.) ([Location 1252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CSBNY9L3&location=1252)) - Back near the start of this chapter, I sketched the evolutionary history of birds and said that their most distinctive feature—feathers—arose even before the dinosaurs in question looked very bird-like. Why did feathers appear so early? Their most conspicuous function now is flight, but feathers, it is thought, appeared initially in animals that had no chance of flying. They must have had some other role. Insulation, the control of temperature, used to be the standard hypothesis on this matter. When I was a student, this was often used as an example of change in function in evolution; feathers first had the function of insulation, and then flight. They initially had one sensible, practical role, and then another. But now it is thought likely that the initial role of feathers, at least in part, was something more extravagant: display. ([Location 1270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CSBNY9L3&location=1270)) - Healthy reefs have an abundance of colors—dark greens, cornflower and neon blues, turquoise, orange, and pink. Why are reefs colored? I had always thought the colors, and their diversity, came from the light-collecting symbionts living inside the coral polyps. Light-gatherers of this kind do not have to be green. But in this case, all the symbionts in corals are fairly closely related and their own color is a green or brown-green, not much different from plants in a forest. The colors in a coral reef—the blues and pinks, the turquoises—instead tend to be largely, at least, a result of chemicals made by the coral animals themselves. These chemicals seem to be provided by the polyps as a kind of sunscreen for their symbionts, to prevent them from being overloaded, and also to organize their light-collecting activities. ([Location 1281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CSBNY9L3&location=1281)) - a collection of stingrays is called a “fever,” ([Location 1303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CSBNY9L3&location=1303))