The curious incident of the dog and the palm tree (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The curious incident of the dog and the palm tree (2015)

ancientrecipes.wordpress.com

38 pointsPetiver8 comments

So they could see pollen, they knew female plants required "covering", yet they didn't discover pollination?

I mean that makes sense. At one point We could see blood and various organs and what not inside the human body, but still believed in humours.

Some things just work without worrying about how they work, and the scientific process is very important for these kinds of "discoveries" regardless of how obvious they look to us.

And how does the dog figure into the story? Doesn't appear to haven anything to do with the pollination... almost as if this was an early form of click bait to draw in the dog lovers to read the papyrus.

It's a pop-culture reference to the title of a recent novel and play, which is, in turn, a Sherlock Holmes reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curious_Incident_of_the_Do...

The article is drawing a distinction between a general theory of pollination as it pertains to flowering plants, vs. knowing only that you take date palm boy dust and put it on date palm girl flowers and then you get dates.

A common way to do this would be to take a branch with the male pollen-producing parts, and 'dust' the flowers on a female specimen with that. Doesn't seem far-fetched the ancients knew this helped to produce a rich harvest. And- from the article:

"As palm trees can be extremely high, this was a very perilous enterprise. Why did this worker even attempt this in a deserted garden will remain a mystery."

One possibility: some plants can be quite selective on when / under what conditions pollination is most likely to succeed.

Probably because fruit (+ seeds) follows, and a plant 'wants' those seeds to be distributed at the right time to maximize chance of offspring success.

Again: maybe such conditions were known, and gardener climbed the tree when the time was right. Which happened to be when no-one else was around.

Of course that's just 1 theory. Maybe gardener just didn't perceive it as dangerous.

I stand corrected, Oxyrhynchus, the name of the palm weevil is also a real name of an Egyptian city. Curiously "AI-esque" but real, it seems.

I wonder if the translation covering could mean here "take cover", "seek refuge" maybe from a dogs attack before falling accidentally.

From the blog author’s commentary, it sounds like they chose to translate “ocheia” as “covering,” as an alternative to the more common translation “pollination.” The blog author worries that even that choice might incorrectly imply that the original writer spoke from a theory of sexual reproduction.

The specifics of that idea didn’t come along until much later [0], while of course people have bred animals and plants for much longer [2] based on the simpler theory of “when a mommy cow and a daddy cow love each other very much, the baby looks like them.”

Even today I think of “covering” in an agricultural context as a euphemism for “making the boy thing mount the girl thing so the babies we want turn up on schedule.” Whether they want to or not, if you’re the kind of person who thinks that matters for animals.

Kind of an icky business, really, the first time you stop and think about it. But in any case, the translator seems to have chosen this very specific sense of the word.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531... if you’re curious

[1] Of course hand-pollination still happens on an industrial scale, for example with vanilla - and more parochially amongst orchid enthusiasts, e.g. https://www.aos.org/orchids/additional-resources/pollinating...

[2] Recall that modern corn is so heavily selectively-bred from its wild ancestor teosinte, over so many millennia, that it can barely pollinate itself without human intervention! https://nebraskacorn.gov/cornstalk/research/history-of-corn-...

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