"coniferous" rhymes with "ferocious." i'm reading this fabulously interesting book entitled "why big fierce animals are rare." i saw this gem in a used bookstore and just had to get it. a book titled "how to make a million dollars doing nothing" wouldn't have been half as enticing. if i had happened upon a companion volume titled: "pandas: totally useless from a biological perspective?" i could have read both books and died happy.

i'm only into chapter two of this book (no signs of animals yet, big, fierce, or otherwise) and already i'm learning boatloads of new information. for example, ever wonder why certain trees are the way they are? a tree's shape is determined by what it needs to do. remember, nature -- as pretty as it can be -- is always about function over style.

take this assertation: trees lose their leaves in the winter because it gets cold.

sounds logical, sounds about right. yet christmas trees with their pine needles don't lose their leaves ever -- until they're yanked from their roots and planted in our living rooms for two weeks anyway. in contrast, the beautiful oak trees we're all so fond of change colors and lose their leaves in the winter, despite not living in especially cold climates. the answer of "some trees are evergreens, some are not" was always enough to answer my curiousity. but it's oh so much more complex -- and exciting.

the oak tree, decorated with leaves of large surface area, has to go leafless in winter because it loses energy too quickly during the short winter sun and heavy winds that it gets exposed to. those beautiful big leaves are great at sucking in energy but they're also great at releasing it quickly. the pine tree, with narrow needle leaves, can't get as much energy during a sunny day, but they won't lose much energy either. thus, the pine tree can keep their leaves during the winter, even in colder weather. plus those pine needles are located very close to each other, which results in less heat loss overall as the leaves work to warm the air around each other. neat hunh?

now that i'm getting a glimpse of the guiding principle to tree building -- energy expenditure and suckture (not a real word) -- i'm seeing trees in all new ways.

it's confusing living in california, because we tend to take plants from their natural environment and then place them wherever we like -- in the middle of parking lots, alongside freeways, lined up a driveway, etc. you aren't really given a sense of the "natural" plant life around us.

reading books about science and biology always makes me lean toward the nurture side of the nature vs nurture debate. high winds equals a certain type of tree, high [blank] leads to a certain kind person. cause and effect, cause and effect. i think people must be built the same way. we are who we are because of what we've encountered, not what we're genetically programmed to be.

if you can find out the guiding principle to how a person is built, then you can find out all about person, and everything will make sense. right? oh to unravel the mystery of personality. what would we need? certainly words is hardly enough.