Comment by lutusp
6 months ago
> Plants hear their pollinators, and produce sweet nectar in response
This is called "anthropomorphizing," the assignment of human traits to non-human entities without evidence. Assigning human traits to non-human processes tends to distort evidence to fit a preconceived narrative.
Look at the title. The terms "hear," "produce," and "in response" all imply human motivations to a process that may instead be an unsentimental evolutionary process in which nature blindly selects an outcome based only on fitness.
This is why Charles Darwin was reluctant to publish his theory -- it implied that nature blindly created outcomes solely based on fitness, not recognizable human qualities as this article suggests. Darwin believed people would reject his theory because it was unsentimental, unromantic, sometimes cruel. And he was right -- people accepted natural selection only after evidence prevailed over sentiment.
This doesn't imply that nature isn't beautiful, it only argues that nature isn't modeled after people. And those who think nature has no sense of humor ... haven't heard about the Platypus.
Plants don't like being anthropomorphized. Btw, I disagree with your definition.
You are inserting "sentiment" to "hear," "produce," and "in response." These are physical actions. Or do you assert trees don't produce fruit in response to good growing conditions?
In response to the rock falling, a large sound was produced, and it startled a fox that heard it. No anthropomorphism.
Anthropomorphism is assigning human qualities onto non-humans. Like my first sentence.
> Or do you assert trees don't produce fruit in response to good growing conditions?
That's correct -- it's not a response as that term is defined, indeed use of the word "response" implies a misunderstanding of natural selection and suggests inheritance of acquired traits.
In a population of trees in the same environment, some produce more fruit due to random genetic variations between individuals. For chemical and biological reasons those specific trees blindly ascend over other genotypes and are over time more likely to prevail over those less fit. That's not a response as we understand the word, it's a product of mathematics and genetics.
> In response to the rock falling, a large sound was produced, and it startled a fox that heard it. No anthropomorphism.
In fact, assuming we assign a human emotion to the fox, as you did, that would be an example of anthropomorphizing.