messages

Here’s a post for the biologists among you. Many, many years ago, when earth was still young and its surface was covered with rocks and mud and oceans full of single cellular life, when life was still primitive and consisted of bacteria only, back then life was very innocent. Happy organisms lived and just split themselves in half and multiplied without the joy and hassles of sex.
Well, we all know what happened since then. Earth has seen the rise of multi-cellular organisms, and concomitantly the advent of sexual reproduction, aiming at efficiently mix two individual gene pools to produce offspring with statistical 50% genes of each parent. Once invented, this new way of reproducing a part of oneself proofed highly efficient in evolutionary terms and resulted in greater variety and faster adaptation to changing ecosystems. As always in life, there was a price tag for this advantage to pay: Mortality.

As individuals we die in a sense because we gained the ability to produce children; bacteria on the other hand just multiply and produce copies that are undistinguishable from the original (in a first approximation at least, things get complicated once you look into the details…).
Now, with this price to pay it becomes quite obvious that sex is a serious business. As individual you must really make sure that you get a good chance to pass on your genes, otherwise your 50% genes will be provided by someone else….in humans, it is a multi billion dollar business, covering all aspects from the beautiful to the ugly.

In plants, it is the fight by all means to attract the right gene carriers, like bees and other helpful folks. Plants have chosen not to walk around, which safes a lot of energy and enabled them to live from solar energy alone, but consequently they face the challenge to meet each other in order to joyfully exchange genetic material. Some species have chosen an anonymous approach; others rely on helpful flying servants, transporting their genes from one place to the other. And again, nothing is for free in life, therefore our static plants have to produce nice calorie packages to go with their genes and invest heavily in marketing for themselves. Artful constructions, gleaming in all bandwidths of the light spectrum, are spreading scented messages, telling innocent bees and other folks that there’s an individual ready to pass on genes and face its own mortality.
Thus, in a sense, all these flower perfume messages are also messages of imminent death.