How do you understand a tree?

How to you understand a tree? There are many ways of doing so.


The above photo, of Bradford pear trees in morning sunlight, is from my Flickr photostream. The photo is a link to the original, which is posted there.

Back when I was a college biology professor, I would occasionally say something like this:

One way to understand a tree is to stand under it. You can listen to the wind blowing through the branches. You can feel the bark, and you can look at the leaves. You can watch for insects and spiders climbing up and down it, and look for birds and squirrels nesting in it. You can try to imagine the life of the tree, through years of growth, in various conditions. You can thank the tree for making shade, which can make life more comfortable, and for giving off Oxygen, which we can breathe. For many trees, you can also thank the tree for its fruit. You can thank it for its beauty during the various seasons of the year.


The picture above is, in part, of cells. It is from a public domain drawing of a microscopic view of part of the bark of a cork oak tree, by Robert Hooke, who named cells because of what he saw -- a resemblance to prison cells.

There's another way to understand a tree. You can take a core sample, and count the rings of annual growth, and make guesses about why some years' growth was larger than others. You can examine sample cells under a microscope, study its biochemistry with various analytic devices, measure the light absorption of the leaves, and count the root branches -- and, if you like, you can take the square root of that number!

Which of the two ways is better? That depends on what you are trying to accomplish, or what you need. Both ways have validity, with a legitimate purpose behind them. The first way can be called holistic, or wholistic. (See Wikipedia on holism.) It may help us to appreciate a tree in ways that the second sort of methods does not. An artist or poet, or a landscape architect, an ecologist, or a property owner, should use the first method.

But the second method is also legitimate. That way can be called reductionistic. As the Wikipedia article referred to above says, "Reductionism in science says that a complex system can be explained by reduction to its fundamental parts. For example, the processes of biology are reducible to chemistry and the laws of chemistry are explained by physics." (See also the Wikipedia article on reductionism, which is a complex subject!)

A wholistic examination of a tree would never discover an explanation for certain processes, such as how water gets to the leaves from the roots, or how photosynthesis works. It would probably not discover that certain medicines could be derived from parts of a tree. Science mostly uses reductionistic methods, so much so that some biologists may be accused of not knowing what the organism they are studying looks like -- they only study cell cultures, or enzymes, or DNA sequences.

The Psalmist said, about a righteous person:
He will be like a tree planted by the streams of water,

that produces its fruit in its season,

whose leaf also does not wither.

Whatever he does shall prosper. (Psalm 1:3, World English Bible, public domain.)

Both methods of looking at trees, or tarantulas, or trout, have their value, and neither method should be ignored or despised at the expense of the other. God presumably looks at trees in both ways, better than we could possibly do so. He has given us the ability to look at trees in both ways. Some of us have talent as photographers, or poets, and some as molecular biologists or geochemists.

One of my daughters gave me a book for Christmas. Soon after starting it, I came across a passage entitled
"I CONSIDER A TREE," and found that the author had thought many of the same thoughts that I had, and more deeply. Martin Buber said this (and more):

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with the earth and air -- and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it as a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law -- of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate.

. . .
It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it.  I and Thou, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Scribner Classics, 2000. pp. 22-23.

I have posted on trees before, here. Thanks for reading.

On Reductionism: Quote from The New Atlantis

Those who would use science to solve real human problems often must first translate those human problems into narrowly technical problems, framed in terms of some theoretically tractable model and a corresponding method. Such tractability offers a collateral benefit: the intellectual pleasure that comes with constructing and tinkering with the model. But there is then an almost irresistible temptation to, as E. A. Burtt said, turn one’s method into a metaphysics—that is, to suppose the world such that one’s method is appropriate to it. When this procedure is applied to human beings, the inevitable result is that the human is defined downward. Thus, for example, thinking becomes “information processing.” We are confronted with the striking reversal wherein cognitive science looks to the computer to understand what human thinking is. Matthew B. Crawford, "The Limits of Neuro-Talk," The New Atlantis, Winter 2008

Thanks for reading. Read the article.

How do you understand a tree? (or under stand it)

How do you understand a tree?

In simplest terms, there are two methods.

1) Holism (Here's the Wikipedia article on the subject)
Stand under a tree. Feel its bark, smell the tree, listen to the wind through the leaves and twigs. Watch the bugs climbing it. Look at how the tree affects other plants.

2) Reductionism (Here's the Wikipedia article on Scientific Reductionism)
The other method is to analyze the tree by destroying it. Take the tree's square root. Count the twigs, branches and buds. Analyze its DNA. Measure its photosynthesis rate.

Both of these methods have their strengths. Holistic tree observation could be taught in college as Tree Appreciation. It may lead to poetry and devotional thoughts. Scientifically, this method sees the tree in context. What is the value of the tree to surrounding organisms? What do the fungi connected to its roots do for the tree? What is the effect of climate and soil? Are the tree's neighbors like it? Are they its offspring, or parents, or siblings?

Robert A. Laughlin, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, has recently written the following, which shows that he is not satisfied with reductionisn:
What physical science thus has to tell us is that the whole being more than the sum of its parts is not merely a concept but a physical phenomenon. Nature is regulated not only by a microscopic rule base but by powerful and general principles of organization. Some of these principles are known, but the vast majority are not. New ones are being discovered all the time. At higher levels of sophistication the cause-and-effect relationships are harder to document, but there is no evidence that the hierarchical descent of law found in the primitive world is superseded by anything else. Thus if a simple physical phenomenon can become effectively independent of the more fundamental laws from which it descends, so can we. I am carbon, but I need not have been. I have a meaning transcending the atoms from which I am made.

Reductionistic tree observation is seldom practiced. Trees are too big, and their generation time is way too slow. (Some such is being done. See also here.) Reductionistic observation is more likely practiced on microorganisms, like Escherichia coli. (There's an E. coli encyclopedia, and its genome has been sequenced.)

What good is reductionistic observation? Well, it tells us something about ourselves. Western medicine is often reductionistic. Treat the disease as if it were in isolation, not the patient. This clearly has some problems, but it has also helped to cut way down on deaths from infection, treat nutritional disorders, help people with depression, and done a lot of other good things. Reductionistic observation of tree tissues, and tree genetics, may make paper manufacture more efficient, or lead to increased fruit production, or cure tree diseases.

We need to see trees, and ourselves, in context, and as whole beings. It's also good if someone can see our blood sugar levels, and what we are producing in our urine. Reductionism and holism both have their place. Both trees, and the atoms from which they are made, have meanings.