[.ca] Reaching for the Sun: How Plants Work (ISBN 0521587387)

From Amazon.com:
Who would have thought that plants behave like squirrels and bears? Yet many do, as we can tell by watching a tree's autumn colors arrive. The yellow and green pigments, carotenoids, are hidden by the green photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll; only when the deciduous plant retrieves this chlorophyll for winter storage do the lighter colors show through. You'll learn about this process, about why one bad apple can spoil a whole barrel, why the Amazon rainforest matters, and myriad other matters of plant life in John King's lively natural history, Reaching for the Sun. The text is technically dense but highly readable.

How plants work.:
Where does a giant sequoia's 1500 cubic meters of volume come from if not soil? How is it that most grasses are not killed by flooding when even a brief period of waterlogged soil will kill many other plants? Why does snow melt near flowering crocuses? What is the 'carbon cycle'? The 'nitrogen cycle'? Is the incredibly complex system known as photosynthesis really fundamental to virtually all life on this planet? Professor King offers and then answers (to the best of our present knowledge) these rather obvious questions as well as others that we may not have thought to ask. For this reader, the first six chapters were the most fascinating. Of photosynthesis, King says; "There are lots of carbon dioxide and water molecules in the air, oceans, lakes, the soil, and inside living organisms, but the chances of any of them simply coming together in the right way to produce even a single molecule of glucose are extremely remote.... is not likely to have happened in the billions of years carbon dioxide and water have existed ... Yet, green plants form glucose from carbon dioxide and water every daylight hour during their growing seasons. Having accomplished that impressive feat, plants then go on to produce a seemingly endless supply of sucrose, starch, and cellulose from the glucose." And of plant's partnerships with nitrogen fixing microbes: "It is, arguably, not to strong to call this process miraculous. The nitrogen fixation carried out by certain microbes at normal temperatures and pressures in and around plant roots we can match only through the use of enormous amounts of energy in the industrial Haber process; temperatures of 300-400°C and pressures greater than 350 atmospheres." Indeed, the botanical world is one of incredibly complex biochemical machinery! Machinery on which we all directly depend. The chapters that follow examine the chemical strategies by which plants survive and reproduce. Where the text speculates about evolutionary pathways, we see, as is typical of such texts (and as Behe, Lovtrup, Yockey, Spetner and others have pointed out), that what is basically assumed to explain 'development' on large scales, "is not so clear" at the biochemical level, and as King concedes, "is not known," and "remains a mystery." What might be the origin of such complex biochemical machinery, if, as King says, "organisms do not put energy and materials into processes that have no function."? It's difficult to see how Darwinian gradualism could design such complexity (unless we are simply predisposed to believe that it did). While King occasionally visits Darwin and these biochemical problems, this volume generally pursues other considerations. The human histories of plants -- in terms of perfumes, the spice trade, agriculture, poisons, intoxicants, and medicines -- are extensively considered in the later chapters. The books greater strength, however, is its revelation of "how plants work." If plants interest you (and they should), then you are the reader that Professor King wishes to educate with this volume. It's an interesting book, although I would have liked further consideration of photosynthesis and less of perfume.