It's all about socialising

The cherry in my garden is some cultivar who has lovely blossoms but no fruit, so I suppose that the tree must be sterile... or something. I didn't think about this when I bought it back in 2000 or whenever it was.

Funny, isn't it, to breed or create something alive that cannot do what living things are all about.

Not that I am that much into fertility.

But, anyway, I am reading a book about the genius of all living things by a doctor, a surgeon, actually. He starts with microbes and their ability to counter antibiotics. Then the immune system, which is fascinating. Says all the lymphocytes are essentially competing for food and food for them is antigens. If a lymphocyte can meet an antigen that it almost matches, it divides frantically and the ones that are most suitable really proliferate: they are the fittest. It's all very Darwinian and there is a lot of competition. Thing is, though, he says that competition, strictly speaking, is a form of co-operation: it's negative co-operation. Clever, that.

Really, the point he is making is that all living things are not here to survive, but to socialise. Socialising, through sex, predation, competition, collaboration, symbiosis, whatever, is what fuels everything. If it were just about survival, then the first species of bacteria would just have hung around as billions of individual cells, thank you very much.

Ultimately, cells come together and create organisms and ecosystems and a living earth. But at each level, there's still all this socialising creating more complexity and variety.

Relationships rely on someone being different from you, even just a tiny bit. Learning and growth comes from appreciating something different from what you knew before.

I like this.

Not sure about the level of pure Darwinism... I mean, the level of cut-throat competition... though maybe it is like that for the lymphocytes. He points out that beauty can be understood better by thinking of life seeking to socialise rather than survive. And that's true.

It's not one of my best ever books... in fact, having finished the very good Memories of Animals (Claire Fuller), Monsters of God (David Quammen) and Ecology and Spirituality (Jack Hunter), my current three are a bit of a let down. OK Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye is good... but, well, too much about childhood... Around the World in 80 Trees? Not great. Oh, and it's the same with the Audible. I'm on a Levison Wood book about trees (meh... though I have to say that the author himself seems rather lovely) and Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, excellently depressing. It is wonderfully written, but also gives one the sense of being shot in the head by a nail gun.

Maybe I should socialise more.