They have little helicopters.
 They have burrs that stick in the fur of animals.
 They have fruit which is tempting to birds and other creatures to eat.
 And they swallow the seeds and take them somewhere else and excrete them.
 In manure, all ready to go.
 They have wonderful little fuzzy things of cotton fibers,
 with a seed in the middle, which float through the air for miles and miles.
 There is also an extremely ingenious plant that has pods.
 And when the pods are ripe, they suddenly break.
 The pod twists itself, each side of it, into a spiral.
 And the seeds are thrown way out.
 We used to have one in our garden in England next to a wooden fence.
 And every time it went crack, all these seeds would rattle on the fence.
 Tremendous energy they were sent out with.
 And look at the whole process of pollination,
 and how extraordinary that is.
 Showing and arguing a very high order of intelligence in vegetables.
 So when we say of somebody, "She's a vegetable, terminal cancer."
 That's alas, only become a vegetable.
 This is a misuse of the word vegetable.
 Vegetables must be respected.
 And people who do respect vegetables, and who talk to them and love them,
 somehow those vegetables respond.
 And they become, we say, they have a green thumb.
 So I think that we are living in an intensely interconnected universe.
 Only our language system has broken it up for purposes of discussion.
 And we spend so much time in discussion,
 that we form the false impression that the world is broken up
 in the way that language breaks it up, and it isn't.
 Now I may know that theoretically, as a scientist, as a biologist,
 or whatever be my approach,
 but I don't necessarily feel it.
 An ecologist, the person who devotes a whole life study
 to realizing the interdependence of everything in the world,
 is in private life still a Christian ego.
 That is to say, a separate soul inside his bag of body.
 That's the way he feels.
 And we have enormous difficulty in avoiding that feeling,
 because of our social influence on each other.
 Now if you befriend, say, a group of Christians,
 and they may be Baptists,
 and for various reasons it's important for you to be a member of this group,
 you will eventually think their way.
 The most startling example of this was an experiment devised by B.F. Skinner.
 He would be giving a class in psychology,
 and he would suddenly send two students out of the room,
 and say, "Come back when we call you."
 Then he would explain to the class the game rule.
 "We're going to put two chairs here, up beside me.
 Chair A, chair B.
 We're going to have a discussion, and these two students are going to come back.
 We will agree with everything that is said by the student who sits in chair A.
 We will disagree with everything said by the student in chair B."
 The effect of this was astounding,
 because even if the student sitting in chair A was rather inarticulate,
 the fact that the group agreed with everything he said
 made him extremely expressive and very happy.
 However articulate the student in chair B, where everything was wrong with him,
 he got completely confused.
 And the only way out was for the student, either student,
 to explain to the class the game rules that they were playing.
 But you see, they didn't know these rules,
 and they had to be very clever indeed to deduce what was the pattern.
 I once got into this situation.
 (Sizzling)


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.62 sec
Decoding  : 0.27 sec
Transcribe: 449.67 sec
Total Time: 450.56 sec