Botany of Desire Excerpt

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Flowers manipulate themselves to be desired as a part of co-evolution in order to advance its own interest. In co-evolution, two parties act on each other to advance their individual interest and end up trading favors. The relationship between a honey bee and a flower is an example of co-evolution. Both parties benefit from each other, the bee gets food and the flower is able to reproduce. The flowers create a scent or an aesthetic appearance, exploiting the honey bees desire.

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Similarly, agriculture is an example of co-evolution between humans and "domesticated" agricultural products. Just like how the apple blossom's form and scent has been selected by bees, potatoes have been selected over several generations by humans for mass production. Apples entice us with its sweetness, tulip with its beauty, cannabis with its intoxication, and potato with its taste.

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Plants make themselves desired to animals in order to be able to pass on its genes to the next generation. The plants able to do this the most effectively will multiply. Our semiconscious awareness to our choices of plants is a part of evolution. Humans regard plants and agriculture by desire while they act on humans, getting them to aid their interest in reproducing.

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This also reflects Charles Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest. The plants manipulate themselves to fit our desires in order to make itself dominant in human agriculture, multiplying its population exponentially greater than wild plants that have not learned to do so yet. Darwin uses the term artificial selection to define the process in which domesticated species come into the world. Human desire plays a role in what nature determines is the "fittest" thereby leading to emergence of new forms of life, evolution.

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