Pine pollen and the Homo Generosus

Welcome to Healing Garden Tenerife TV! - Today I want to show you something very special. We are here in the middle of the pine forest, in the Pinar. It's a beautiful area here, you don't want to speak so loudly.

What you see here will become a cone like this one day. But it needs two years to grow. When I was collecting pollen, I always wondered at first what these strange 'things' were.

When I was collecting pollen, I always wondered what these strange 'things' were.

If you look closely, you can see that the structure that the cone will have one day is already laid out here in miniature. These are the female flowers. Once again to the science.

We know this. There are men and there are women. Meanwhile, there is also something else, but that is another topic. - Even with many trees and plants, there are purely male and purely female specimens. But there are also trees, like the pine tree, where both sexes appear on the same tree.

This also shows that the pine is an old tree. Perhaps you also know that according to Plato, even humans used to be unisexual, i.e. androgynous. At any rate, this is what the ancient Greek legends of the prehistory of mankind claim. The myth of Atlantis.

Botanists assume that first there were the so-called monoecious trees, i.e. those that form both sexes together. Only later in evolution did this differentiate into male and female plants.

Botanists assume that there were first so-called monoecious trees, i.e. those that produce both sexes together.

A very illustrative example of the difference between male and female plants is marijuana. The female plants are grown because the flowers contain THC. The male plants, on the other hand, contain no THC at all. Nevertheless, they are cultivated to obtain the fibre as a raw material for the industry. That's just as an example.

With the pine it is different. Here both sexes appear together. These are the male flowers, which have now faded. Here is another flower that is still very fresh. This flower has not yet opened. It will open and then the pollen will be released.

The pine tree reproduces by wind pollination, not with the help of bees. That's why it has nothing to do with bee pollen. No insects are needed. The wind distributes the pollen from the male flowers, the dust falls on the female flowers. As soon as these are fertilised, an insane growth process begins.

Sometimes you can see the flowers that have just been pollinated. They look like bonsai cones, very small but already brown. They grow for two years until they finally fall to the ground and slowly open. Then they release the seeds and grow into new pine trees!

What did we learn today? We learned that pines are monoecious plants. Plants, in other words, that have both sexes in them, which suggests that they are a very ancient tree species. And we learned that pines reproduce by wind pollination. So without insects and also without brush. In China, where bees are extinct, flowering plants are now pollinated by humans by hand.

When I see that the pine tree produces about ten million times more seeds than would be necessary for reproduction. It is the same with humans. One ejaculate contains several million sperm. Then I always ask myself: Why does nature do that? Nature could simply produce one or two, or even ten, sperm. Why this gigantic abundance, this overabundance?

One thought that can be sparked by this is that nature does not always work with efficiency. There is that too. I have eight hours of working time today and in those I want to 'get something baked'. That's the principle of efficiency and that's fine too.

But there is another principle in nature. The principle of redundancy, of abundance. That is: much more than necessary, free giving. That goes a long way. It's not just an idea you can have once in a while.

Darwin wrote two books on evolution that are interesting in this context. Only one of them is known to most people today, namely 'The Origin of Species by Natural Selection', survival of the fittest, adaptation etc.

But Darwin later wrote a second book that hardly anyone knows today, on 'The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection'

To summarise: Darwin says that there are two factors of evolution. The first factor is nature - survival by adaptation. And the second big factor, that's THE FEMALE! It's the same with animals. Since the female has to take care of raising the young, it is also the female who chooses the mate.

The man tends to be knitted in such a way that he 'just takes what comes in front of the shotgun'. The woman, on the other hand, looks much more closely. She says to herself: I have to raise the children, so I need a man who is reliable.

Sexual selection is not about who is the most frugal, the most efficient and the best adjusted. It is about who is the most wasteful, who has the most abundance and who is the most generous.

An image of this abundance is the pollen produced by the pine tree. Everything is full of pollen, the soil is nourished, there is much more than is needed. Subscribe now to Subscribe to Healing Garden's newsletter and learn more every day than is needed for bare survival!

PS: If you want to learn more about the context presented, book 'Homo Generosus' by Tor Norretranders is highly recommended.