World Spathiphyllum and Big Bang

From: "Ron Iles" roniles at eircom.net> on 2001.04.28 at 03:40:40(6290) Collecting Spathiphyllum in the 21st Century isn't easy. Maybe I'll grow just the ordinary kinds that everybody else seems to grow, just the few unless. I know little about Amorphophallus but obviously agree that both quantity and quality are important and so I began to wonder about what we call things and Big Bang. So, this is a little Stapelian breather between AMP snortings. +More Naming and ordering natural living things is called Taxonomy. It gives "surnames" and individual names in an evolution based system dreamed up by Linnaeus when Naturalists were. Taxonomists dry newly discovered "wild" plants and keep them like mummies in herbaria with their own and the mummies names on them as memories of them for when the real plants are extinct. Plant taxonomy is based mostly on what the plants look like. In their obituaries, some taxonomists write details of where the plants were found and include photos which makes it more interesting for newspaper readers. Anyway its kinder to a dying beast to show not only what it looked like but as much as possible of how and why and where it was. Taxonomists often change the names, If they are old, the names I mean, the changes can be confusing to people who actually grow the living things and know differently a bit of what they, the things with the names I mean, look like. With all the possible hybrids even between different genera what "species" means has become more and more difficult to decide. How can one ever really "name" a hybrid, a "variety" or a "cultivar"? And now even worse, there's "genetic engineering". Man is making his own "species". Now, you can even make a monkey which has jelly fish in it. (It would be silly to do the oppsite). What kind of "species" or family thing is that? So now, in a very few years, after selective breeding and tissue culture, we'll have "super species" dominating the Earth. Our super mothers and super fathers may be say part bird, part fish, part Peace Lily? How will we really know what "species" "he" and "she" really were? Linnaeus has been noisy on Death row for a long time. Is he nearing Execution time? He is? Hurray! INDIVIDUALS can now be identified by their DNA not just their appearance. They can be given NUMBERS to tell all about their real Nature, not only their ancestry but their potential. Every individual animal or plant can have a different number. An infinite living rainbow of noughts and ones. No silly genera, no frustrating species any more. No need for the ping pong of taxonomy. DNAs analysed properly in a blink by Computer and number coded. Linnaeus gone gone dead dead. Once we've got the number we can each call it what we like, hundred of different things with the same number. God Numbers back towards Big Bang telling from where each and every one of us really came and proclaiming our inferiority or superiority and pre-determining our destiny, ashcan or space rocket. With wilder than Fantasy Names. Wild but independent of crude uncertain nasty Nature. Diversity totally limited and controlled by MAN. Everything, everyone, with bar code tags to go though a million Life Bank checkouts. Blanket man made diversity everywhere. Wonderful! Far more spectacular and better for wise Man. In this New Eugenic Order (NEO), taxonomists won't need to work in the "field" any more. The boring old wild stuff will be in museums, herbaria mostly safely dead, dried, stuffed or re-modelled. Genetic engineering, zillion cloning and DNA tagging has signed Linnaeus's Death Warrant. Botany can now just help Horticulture to man-make gene pools so much better than wild. The taxonomists, collectors, conservationists and Nature Photographers and Film Makers all did their best to record the uncontrolled disorderly mess that went before but.... So, welcome to the NEW diversities never dreamed of or allowed by Nature.....When one sees what Man can do so rapidly to "natural species" by HIS selection it is obvious that his wisdom will be the greatest thing since smoked chalk. It will be brilliant wall to wall monoculture for the new superfolk. Man's final tamed supremecy over Nature . Multicolored Travellers Trees, psychodelic Suwanees, twenty foot stinking Amorphophalli, and other most desirable things never imaginable to Nature will be on tap to Adult consumers everywhere. The ordinary and boring can be relegated to the obscurity where they belong. Wonderful! Tissue Culture Gardening is so much better than Botany at deciding on what kinds things people really want. In a few years I wonder what rarities you'll collect? If you want enough they can always be genetically engineered or the DNA brought back fro the dead and tissue cultured back again. Wonderful. I'm glad collecting all those wild Spathiphyllum is so difficult now, the new kinds are so much better and you can even buy them from the corner shop numbered properly so you can call them as many names as you like. Did you know there are only a measly forty one wild dull Peace Lilies but soon there may be a thousand? Nothing is certain of course and I may have it all wrong. So - just to be safe, anybudy got ANY gracious exquisitely perfumed green and white species to spare? I still need the small floribundum type with white midrib which I got from Cali, Colombia over fifteen years back. No DNA number maybe yet but it's called "Mini" in horticulture I think and apparently it hasn't been named as a species yet? Can you help with that number please? Ron Greenman

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