Complimentary Blueberry Juice

The five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. These are the ways in which humans perceive the world.

We can further single out sight as a sense that likely does more to influence us over all the others. If we can’t see it, we don’t believe it. Or we do see it, and refuse to believe it.

This paper in Nature about how trees produce isoprene (the building block of rubber) which may act as a precursor to cloud formation is an example of something we can’t even perceive at all.

But it is always worth keeping in mind that our senses are detecting the molecular. Smell is volatile organic compounds at a molecular level, taste is organic compounds at a molecular level, and touch is also occurring at a molecular level.

It is always worth remembering that all processes happen at the molecular level. We cannot see them. The implications of our “molecular blindness” are everywhere in our modern society….from our collective denial that chemicals affect us to our collective denial that some atmospheric gases are more consequential than others.

The more beautiful and contemplative implications are in examining the life around us: how, exactly, does a plant root encounter water, embedded in a clay platelet? What signals are passed from a single-celled soil organism to a plant? How do single-celled organisms embed themselves in plant tissue? What compounds make plants respond, the way high fat or high sugar foods make a human respond? Why does a potato beetle think a potato leaf is tasty? What are cabbage butterflies paying attention to that make everything in the cabbage family a landing site?

Every interaction at every point is a molecular one.

Everything has evolved to heighten or ignore certain molecular signals for interpretation.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice