In an interview on Plant Hunting

What about the next one, The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan?

Michael Pollan is an American journalist, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and a bestseller in the States. He was an amateur gardener who has turned into a food and plant writer, focusing in particular on where the American diet is going. This is a fairly simple book, a biography of four plants: the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato. The traditional view is that human beings have hybridised and selected plants for their own devices, and the human being is doing the manipulation. Pollan’s premise is essentially that of The Selfish Gene, although he doesn’t credit Richard Dawkins.

So this is the plants’ way of surviving?

He’s saying plants find ways of ingratiating themselves to humans to ensure their genetic material is perpetuated. With apples it’s sweetness, with potatoes their ability to stave off famine, with marijuana, getting high, with tulips their flamboyant colours. The plants may really be more in control of the process than we think.

I saw a television programme about dogs which put forward the same argument, that they are a parasitic species relying on the affection they trigger in humans to survive.

Yes, this is the same argument. I’m not sure Pollan’s theory is scientifically correct or more of a hunch, but it’s a tour de force. If he’d been an academic this would have been a rather tedious book, but he’s a journalist and because he comes to this as a professional writer, it’s a fun read. He delves out the most amazing information.