Exactly!

While the continents might look like they fit together, and the rock types and ages and fossils match at key points all down the coasts from Canada/Scotland all the way down to South America and South Africa, how on earth (sorry) would you explain how the continents are thousands of miles apart?

One theory posited the earth spinning so fast centrifugal forces ripped ehat would become the moon out of the Pacific, sucking Eurasia and America into the void.

That's a Randall Monroe WhatIf if ever I saw one. Think of the energy involved! All life on earth would be extinct.

So these theories were laughed out of scientific court. Until Vine and Matthew's seminal paper on magnetic stripes being mirrored over the mid ocean ridge showed there had to be something forcing the plates apart.

That’s cute honey, would you like an internet.

He actually described the continents as scraping across an ancient and immobile seafloor. This was deemed mechanically implausible and contributed greatly to the rejection of Continental Drift. If Al stuck with his detailed phenomenological approach, there may have been wider adoption of his detailed and careful observations.

This happens a lot on mathematics, you figure out something that it's looks incredible just to find out Euler already found it centuries ago.

"yep, that pretty far"

Wouldn’t Darwin have already known that the Greeks had calculated the circumference of the earth like 2000 years before him?

That theory sounds bad, like the opposite problem we’ve currently got. Eventually it’d turn into mad max

Sure we are pattern matching machines. We had to be the humans that couldn't figure out "big scary noise usually means big scary threat" died off.

My hat goes off to all the great minds in the sciences that can not only overcome this tendency but using it AT THE SAME TIME!

I mean, figuring out how to destroy something is always easier than how to create

But 𝕏crements are my favorite genre of meme

Biologist here. I promise I’m not laughing at you.

While I’d be a bit cautious about throwing around a word like “consciousness” without defining it, you’re absolutely right. Trees, and pretty much every living thing, are aware of their environment. They’re capable of communication and coordinated responses to threats. They have complex and intricate lifecycles and many levels of interactions with other plants and animals. One of the more profound passages I read (from Jurassic Park, whose author I otherwise detest) had the paleobotanist comment something along the lines that everyone sees plants as a background against which animals act, but they’re their own ecosystem, just as much red in tooth and claw (or cooperative, if you prefer) as any group of dinosaurs.

Being one of those weird theoretical biologists, I’d even let you get away with using a word like “intent” as long as we mean “a learned and stereotyped response to an environmental condition.” Oaks aren’t debating the meaning of life, and they’re not deciding in a sense more meaningful than an “if then else” kind of clause. I mean, I don’t think humans have free will either, so I’m not just ragging on trees here - but that’s a different conversation. They make decisions like “if it’s been warming up for a while and getting sunny, start making leaves again.” It’s genetic/evolutionary learning rather than neural, but it’s still learning. It’s just much slower.

It’s also not racist for oaks to feed other oaks any more than it’s racist for humans to eat corn. Or corn dogs.

I’m not going to get into the differences between group selection versus kin selection dynamics because that would break my New Year’s resolution.

Trees have consciousness

I mean...

and are kinda racist

/facepalm

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-8922-1 ;)

Happy to share the pdf. Quanta also has a bunch of articles on plant "cognition." They are very much living, aware beings.

"Trees are assholes" - Randy Hickey

That moment when it sounds like somebody was watching too much Avatar while high on shrooms, but he's actually referencing recent science.