Trafficone

Some version of this concept has floated (pun intended) around for a while. Thing is that plastics are an energy dense “food source” and once something evolves a way to metabolize it they’ll have a huge advantage.

It’s like how glyphosate tolerance has appeared in weed plants already. Evolution is always looking for an angle.

No, you might be a primitivist, feudalist, syndicalist, or any of many other ways of organizing society. What you adopt will depend on your values and how you perceive the relationship between people and capital. Ultimately the labels are helpful up to a point, because the application of theory, or praxis, will manifest in ways to meet the need of your time.

Just to get ahead of it, capitalist can mean both one who supports capitalism as a way to organize society, and one who owns capital. From context it’s clear we mean the former definition.

Sure! So, there’s this mechanism called “methylation” that can turn off which genes are expressed at different times/in different tissues. It occurs in almost all organisms, but we don’t fully understand the role it plays across different tissues in plants. However, the evidence suggests it may play a significant role in cells going from being stem cells (as in can become many kinds of cell, not literally part of the stem), to being the tissue they ultimately end up as. Better understanding this may help us figure out why some plants can easily be vegetatively propagated, while others are more picky about it.

Researching plant genomes! Honestly, it’s a lot of fun.