Seed

Craig Morey
20 December 2025


* * * * * * * * *


There is an enormous amount of complexity within a tree. Roots draw in water and gather minerals from the earth, networks of xylem carry the water up through to the rest of the plant, leaves take in sunlight and air and build it into sugars, and tunnels of phloem spread these sugars back down through the tree. At the microscopic level, millions of cells work mostly autonomously, each of them highly specialized and yet each carrying out its own individual selfish processes of living and growing, unaware of the larger project in which they are participating.

To what purpose is all of this work being carried out? The answer depends on the observer. To the lumberjack, the tree is producing building material. To the orchardkeeper, it is making food. To the park ranger, the purpose of the tree is its interdependence with the rest of the forest, or perhaps simply its physical beauty. But what about to the botanist, free from any concerns about human applications? From an evolutionary biology perspective, the entirety of a tree is devoted to one single purpose. Every biochemical process, every inch of growth, every individual cell works together for one thing and one thing only: the seed. Everything a tree does, everything a tree has, everything a tree wants, is ultimately justified by its contribution to the final goal of producing the seed.

But even this framing, with every part of a massive tree focused single-mindedly on the production of a tiny seed, is too narrow. No tree stands alone. A forest is a grand collaboration, with trees communicating through pheromones in the air, sharing resources under the ground, and even sharing cooperatively with fungi at their roots and with pollinators in the air. The blueprints for constructing a tree, protein by protein, are passed down from parent to child through countless generations. Behind the physical trees themselves is another much larger tree, a tree of phylogeny, which stretches back through the eons, from the world’s first cell, to algae, to plant, to tree, with each twig its own entire lineage. Branches are pruned at random by the blind orchardkeeper of evolution, not according to their individual fruitfulness but simply by climate, predation, disaster, or pure accident, and yet these random cuttings nonetheless steer the tree toward ever greater complexity and strength. All of it, from the viewpoint of the biologist, all four billion years of development across the entire surface of the planet, culminates in the production of the seed. The seed, then, is the purpose of the tree and of everything that stands below and behind it.

This world is home to many species, but one in particular stands out as more complex, more all-consuming, and more obscure in its purpose. On top of the rivers of phylogeny flowing out from dark primordial headwaters, on top of the cooperation between swarms of individual cells, the complexity of the organs and physiology, on top of the environmental interdependency and the plants and animals that are consumed or otherwise integrated into the project, for this species there is also the development of language, of culture, of technology. In parallel with and surpassing the transfer of genetic knowledge is the transfer of conscious societal knowledge, allowing for a complexity much greater than what could be supported by any one genome or any one brain. Economies and governments develop, the natural ecosystem is twisted and manipulated into service, towers larger than any tree are pushed up from the ground first with wood, then stone, then metal, and finally with synthetic materials never before seen. Wars are fought, genocides carried out, the whole of the biosphere is squeezed dry of any possible material use, and finally, finally, after the natural world has been clawed away and the oceans left to boil and the sky to burn and the vast majority of the people themselves have been carelessly discarded to crawl despondently through the streets below, after any thought of purpose has been forgotten, burned away with the world below it, finally, from the top of a tall tower there comes suddenly and unexpectedly, a reminder. Minuscule compared to the ravished world it springs from, it contains everything needed to begin all over again. The genetics, the cultural memory, the technical knowledge, all encased in a protective shell recognizable to any walnut tree and carried along by solar winds familiar, in their essence, to any maple. And as it clears the atmosphere to then spiral away from its exhausted and desiccated parent world, as the crawling masses look up and watch it leave in horror or in rage or in hope, and wonder hopelessly to what purpose they have been faced with all this suffering and death and destruction, it is the botanist who knows the answer. The purpose, the purpose of everything in the end, is the seed.

But it’s hard to imagine that the trees could be satisfied with such an answer.


* * * *  END  * * * *