I was psyched today having finally attended The Philadelphia Flower Show.  I wanted to go for years but never found the time. I was drawn by the unexpected, little reproductions of houses that transport you into another world,  made entirely of plants.  They had plenty of giant horticultural displays with explosions of color and that was good, but I preferred smaller pictures  and scenes of whatever size, dioramas, montages, made, of nothing but parts of plants and they had beautiful artistic renderings. Those who conceived of these displays were also extremely meticulous in their construction which obviously involved long and patient work, and many of the productions turned out to be highly realistic so much so that they beckoned you into their scenes. One was  a reconstruction of a Frank Lloyd Wright house similar to Falling Water. Another was a Starry Night Van Gogh like display and another large montage, was called Musee d’Art. with a couple of familiar sculpted characters.  I like nothing better than to place myself into a room or scene. I decided then how much I reveled at the juxtaposition of unlike or unexpected parts, which reminds me of something else entirely.

Ask the average bloke what one thing defines living things, what distinguishes animal from mineral,  and he is likely to say,  reproduction.  Everything from a virus to a pitcher plant, yes, there was a whole group of those insect-trapping carnivorous plants, to sequoia trees, reproduces.  He is not going to mention ingestion or excretion, or motility or growth, characteristics of most living things. And the average person isn’t far from wrong,  except for one tiny detail that to me, is all important. Animals and plants reproduce, but almost never make exact copies of themselves.

The key to biology is variation. Even unicellular creatures that reproduce by fission or simply splitting apart, find that they are different over many generations, not only because of accumulation of mutations but also due to infidelity of reproduction.  We see that in the embryo, where one, then two then four cells seem to be making identical copies except that over many generations some of their offspring are livers and other are bones or brains. So organisms reproduce, yes, but fail to make exact copies of themselves and we witness every day how different children of the same parents can be.

Then ask yourself why is sexual reproduction so very popular among plants and animals? From the evolutionary perspective why are there so many organisms around today that reproduce sexually?  Sexually reproducing animals and plants are in the majority because those that reproduced in this way had an advantage in fitness. This is not because sex is fun, but due to the fact that it helps to mix up and distribute minute and major differences within a population.

Take these two concepts, that of slight infidelity of reproduction which over many iterations amounts to accumulation of difference, and the preponderance of sexualreproduction, and you realize the very basis of life is not reproduction per se but diversity. It is the Diversity within a group that allows that group to survive through the pressure of environmental change. Species are diverse.  Even single families are diverse. While you tend to have families of Bachs, you just never know when the next musical genius will show up where you least expect her, which is why we should never give up on any source of human potential. Did you catch the story of how Inocente,  a young girl in a family of 4 children born of an illegal immigrant homeless single mother, learned to paint from a city Van Go art truck and became a famous sought after painter?  You just never know.

But most people who took biology in school don’t realize, that animals and plants preadapt to environmental change. Let’s say you have a family whose  members vary along a scale of fatness. For many years there is enough food but there happen to be a few lean seasons in a row where there is insufficiency of calories. Assuming there are only some survivors, those who were capable of storing more fat might be the ones who survived. These folks had no idea, but by virtue of their being just a little fatter, they adapted better to these lean conditions. They were pre-adapted.  If everyone was equally thin,they’d be equally extinct. And so it goes. Organisms by virtue of their differences pre-adapt to environmental perturbation.

Now fast-forward to the twenty-first century where all the rage is cloning, extensive reproduction of successful strains of identical organisms. This is factory or industrial farming.   We have farm after farm around the world with corn and soy, such that billions of humans depend on their sustenance on just a few plant varieties.  By the way it is entertaining to consider, who is the primary beneficiary of extensive reproduction of monocultures. Is it humans or the plant varieties we reproduce? The plants have capitalized on vast numbers of human workers for their own reproductive purposes, but aside from that, as I point out above, cloning goes against what occurs in nature which is to increase variation, and with sexual reproduction to mix and match these divergencies.  Cloning should be recognized for what it is, anti-biological, unnatural.  In the plant world, humans may think themselves very smart having developed one variety or corn which is resistant to insect or fungal attack. But suppose you reproduce a monoculture of cloned corn plants and there happens to occur, a bit of an environmental shift not confined to but including global warming as example, then this identical unvarying variety of corn plants is bound to die without a trace. We humans and our corn plant masters, become all the more vulnerable.

Things may not be quite as bad as this but you and I like nothing better than to make lots of copies of things that are currently profitable, to sell these copies far and wide,  and get rich.  In doing so we need to be mindful of the reduction of variation, what I would term malignant homogeneity which if not monitored closely may  lead to our accelerated obsolescence. Horticulturalists and biologists are apparently aware of this, and some strive  to preserve libraries of species variability in plant cultivars. But it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves of this once in a while especially as animal and plant species spread over the world (well described in the book “1493” by Charles Mann) and human activity accelerates the extinction of  record numbers of species.

Seeing Philadelphia Flower Show I’m of divided mind. On the one hand, there were huge collections of identical plantings, as with red roses and the begonias.   On the other side was diversity of form of plant life and the ingenious uses and imaginative artistic displays, declaring again, variety is indeed the spice of life.