PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature no.
9, 2012
Wild Seed, Domesticated Seed
Companion species and the emergence of agriculture
Thom Van Dooren1
Agriculture came about as early human cultures
intensified their use and care of particular plants and
animals that they found to be of value ... Humans came
to depend on these domesticated species for food, feed,
and fiber, and most of them became dependent on us.2
Agriculture is today utterly central to human relationships with plants. Not only
is it the site of what many people take to be the most invasive of our engagements with
plants – the modification of their genomes to meet human needs – but land clearing for
agriculture is also one of the principal causes of the loss of forests and other native
vegetation around the world. In both of these ways, agriculture now profoundly
structures human relationships with plants, and it has done so for many thousands of
years. From those first tentative movements towards a new kind of relationship
between people and plants – towards the new ways of getting on together that we now
call “agriculture” – the lives and possibilities of all of those involved have been
powerfully reshaped. This paper attempts to rethink these agricultural relationships, to
provide an understanding that is a little different from the dominant narrative of the
human “invention” of agriculture and “domestication” of crop plants.
Inspired in part by the beautiful symmetry in Steve Gliessman’s account of the
origins of agriculture (some of which is evident in the quote above), this paper proposes
a way of understanding human/crop relationships in which all of the parties are placed
at stake and changed by their interactions. The paper moves through a brief initial
investigation of the “domestication” of crop plants, back in time to some of the early co-‐‑
evolutionary interactions between plants and various animals (long before humans
emerged on the scene), to propose that Donna Haraway’s notion of “companion
species” might be helpful in understanding how plants, people and the broader
environment have all acted and been changed in the coming into being of agriculture.
From wild to domesticated
In The Emergence of Agriculture, Bruce D. Smith offers a conventional definition of
the term “domestication” as: “the human creation of a new form of plant or animal -‐‑ one
that is identifiably different from its wild ancestors and extant wild relatives”.3
Irrespective of the crop type or the understandings and beliefs of the peoples who first
entered into agricultural relationships with these plants all those thousands of years
ago, the process through which crop plants were altered is today popularly thought
about in this way -‐‑ in terms of “domestication”. How, though, is domestication different
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to evolution? Why are some plants characterised as having simply “evolved”, and
others as having been “domesticated”?
In an effort to answer these questions, I’d like to start in this paper by considering
in a little more detail two of the first morphological changes that are believed to have
occurred in seed bearing plants that became “agriculturally involved” with humans.
Smith is my guide into these early plant changes, but while I will draw primarily on his
account, I will do so in a way that “twists” his interpretation a little, opening it up in a
way that might problematise any simple understanding of what it means to be
“domesticated”.
The first of these major morphological changes in plants was the development of
a significantly larger seed with a thinner seed coat. The speculated reasons for these
changes are relatively straightforward. In crowded agricultural seed beds, “[s]eedlings
that could sprout quickly, grow rapidly towards the sun, and then shade nearby
seedlings with their spreading leaves have a distinct advantage”.4 These plants are more
likely to make it through the season, to produce seeds, and thus to contribute seeds to
next year’s planting cycle. Where humans are not involved, however, a seed often has to
remain dormant for months. Over this period it must be protected from both predators
and weather, requirements that make a small size and a thick seed coat desirable. Once
humans begin to collect, store and replant seed in crowded beds the increased nutrients
from a larger seed and the lack of delay in germination from a thinner seed coat make it
far more competitive. In short, when humans become agriculturally involved the plant’s
environment changes in certain specific ways which give plants with some types of
seeds a competitive advantage over others.
The second key change in some plants after entering into agricultural relations
with people was the retention of seeds (which in wild relatives are scattered) in terminal
clusters (while in wild relatives these seeds are often spread out on branches).5 Again in
this case, agricultural interactions with humans (and all of the other organisms in
agricultural ecosystems) produced different selection pressures. Whereas plants had
once needed to protect their seeds from predators and to scatter them in dribs and drabs
(either to the wind, or taking advantage of animals as dispersal systems), within an
agricultural system it was those plants that held onto their seeds and condensed them in
several larger locations that were more likely to have their seeds harvested by humans,
and thus be able to contribute to next year’s planting cycle.6
Clearly, these sorts of initial changes would have made a remarkable difference to
the yields of early farmers, and so the competitiveness of an agricultural subsistence
strategy. It was these types of changes that marked the beginnings of domestication.
And yet, as Smith points out, “[t]hese changes, rather than being deliberately caused by
humans, were probably in large measure unintentional and automatic responses to
human planting, part of the adaptive syndrome of domestication”.7 With this in mind,
we might ask: what is it about the early changes in “domestic” plants noted above that
distinguishes them from other processes of evolution? The changes undergone in this
early period were surely very significant, both for the plants and for the diverse
communities of people and other animals that settled with them. But why are these
processes cordoned off in a separate realm of “domestication” or “artificial selection”,
kept separate (conceptually at least) from other dramatic and important changes, such
as the “natural selection” driven co-‐‑evolution of a range of nonhuman species; like
insects and flowers, or fruits and some animals?
Again, Smith offers a conventional account of domestication in which this
conceptual cordoning off of processes of domestication from those of evolution, can be
clearly seen:
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When human beings took control of the reproductive cycles of some populations of
certain species by harvesting, storing, and planting their seeds in prepared areas,
they effectively created a separate and parallel world for these plants. Populations
of the same species that grew beyond the human realm continued to be shaped by
the rules of reproductive competition and survival in the natural world, but those
plants now controlled by humans became subject to new rules for success.8
While there is certainly a great deal of truth in this account of early human/plant
agricultural relations, the idea that there are two separate realms, the natural and the
human, is clearly problematic. “Wild” and “domesticated” plants are not involved in
separate evolutionary dramas. Rather, many plants are involved in ongoing interactions
across the domestic/wild border. While on the surface this may seem an insignificant
(and entirely obvious) point, there are two reasons why I think that it matters. Firstly,
this “separate realms” story is complicit in the erasure of human dependence on non-‐‑
agricultural biodiversity, which has always been, and continues to be, a vital genetic
input into crop varieties (not to mention other biological systems). Secondly, this type of
story covers over many of the broader risks to non-‐‑agricultural biodiversity of what we
do on farms (such as those posed by “genetic pollution” from genetically modified
crops9). In reality, human/crop interactions are far more tangled and interesting than
any straightforward division between the wild and the domestic, or the natural and the
artificial, allows for.
Human/crop co-‐‑evolutions
In addition to the conceptual division between wild and domestic realms that are
in reality messily entangled, a further implication of this conventional account of
domestication is that all of the agency – the power and ability to act – in the
relationships between plants and people, is taken to reside with the latter. It is people
who “set up the new rules for success”, and the plants that are consequently reshaped
through exposure to this new environment. Here, “nature has been moulded to human
ends”10; passive nonhumans are worked upon and transformed by human rationality
and agency to produce new varieties of plants and animals. Charles Darwin offers
another example of this way of thinking when, in On the Origin of Species, he cites Lord
Somerville who says of breeders that, “It would seem as if they had chalked out upon a
wall a form perfect in itself, and then had given it existence”.11
This notion of human agency working on a passive nature is central to the
discourse of domestication. Drawing on a long history of thinking in which humans are
seen to be somehow “outside” of the natural world – rationally planning and executing
designs, whether they be houses or new crop varieties12 – domestication has often been
seen as something that is done to a plant or animal by humans, an artificial imposition
on an otherwise irrational nature. Within this dualistic framework, whether cast
positively or negatively, this imposition on nature can never be equivalent to the
interactions of other animals with one another or plants that take place within an
environment; in short, it can never be viewed as the “evolution” that takes place when
selection pressures are introduced from inside and as part of, the natural environment.
But is this the only, or even the best, way to understand the changes that crop
plants have undergone as a result of their agricultural involvement with various human
communities? In stark contrast to this understanding, Donna Haraway has proposed
that we might broaden the notion of evolution to make room for humans and our co-‐‑
shaping interactions with others. In doing so, we acknowledge that human biology and
human cultures – however these are conceptually divided from each other – have
emerged out of relationships with plants and other species on this planet.
Co-‐‑evolution has to be defined more broadly than biologists habitually do.
Certainly, the mutual adaptations of visible morphologies like flower sexual
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structures and the organs of their pollinating insects is co-‐‑evolution. But it is a
mistake to see the alteration of dogs’ bodies and minds as biological and changes in
human bodies and lives, for example in the emergence of herding or agricultural
societies, as cultural, and so not about co-‐‑evolution.13
In making this point Haraway is thinking along the same lines as Anna Tsing when she
prompts us to imagine a “human nature” that shifts “historically together with varied
webs of interspecies dependence”, and consequently insists that “Human nature is an
interspecies relationship”.14 Both theorists see the co-‐‑evolutionary interactions between
humans and various non-‐‑humans as ones in which all of us “emerge” through ongoing
and co-‐‑constitutive interactions in which some actors have more control than others, but
none is in control.
Even when humans attempt consciously to impose selection pressures on plants
they are not the only meaningful agents involved. Plant breeders – whether working
today, one hundred years ago, or ten thousand years ago – do not create out of, or into,
empty space. Rather, every act of “making” is a negotiation with the other actors with
whom we work within a particular situated context.15 Any changes that plants (and
others) undergo will be achieved through the combined efforts of more than just the
humans – whether they be “pests”, weather conditions, competing plants, or even virus
vectors in genetic engineering programs. In paying attention to the diverse nonhuman
agencies at work in human/plant relationships we move towards a view of the world
that would perhaps be strange, yet familiar, to some of the cultures around the world
that view plants as “persons”.16
Within this context the human invention of agriculture might be rethought in a
way that also acknowledges the teaching of agriculture to humans by plants. It is quite
likely, for example, that the first patches of edible plants that grew up around human
communities came from our rubbish tips (where some seeds and spoiled food were
discarded) or from our latrines and spittoons.17 These are processes of “domiculture”, in
which plants (and people) spread through their use of one another.18 How it is that
plants moved around with people and got into rubbish tips, however, is not a story of
human agency working on plants. Rather, being eaten, carried to, or spat out in distant
places, has in an important way been the evolutionary goal of many of these plants for a
very long time. It is something that they have worked towards for millions of years.
Ending up in these “undesirable” (but nutrient laden) places in gatherer-‐‑hunter camps
was, therefore, neither an accident nor the result of solely human action, but was rather
the realisation of a diverse set of co-‐‑evolutionary relationships.
In order to see how this might have happened, we will need to move back in time
again, to a period well before the birth of agriculture or even the appearance of Homo
sapiens. Our guide in this period will be Gary Paul Nabhan, and in particular his outline
of some of the pivotal moments in the early evolutionary interactions between insects,
animals and plants in Enduring Seeds.19 Nabhan begins this discussion with the
production of chemicals by plants that were aimed at deterring insects, but which
actually ended up attracting some insects in the more diluted forms that they took in
flower petals. The co-‐‑constitutive interactions between insects and flowers from this
point on are well known. Flowers produced particular scents, colours and nectars to
attract insects – who came for a variety of reasons ranging from food and protection, to
a safe place to mate – but ended up being covered in pollen which they then carried on
to the next flower that they visited.
Ultimately, some plants evolved to specialise in satisfying the needs of particular
insects (and vice versa), which both increased the chances of successful fertilisation and
produced incredible flower diversity that ranges from roses and sunflowers to carrion
flowers that attract flies with the smell of rotting meat. In the case of seed bearing
plants, it was important that seeds not simply be dropped to the ground by the feet of
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their parents. To do so would result in a “natural monoculture” in which pests and
diseases would thrive.20 While wind and water could act as dispersal agents for some
seeds, other plants took up an opportunity for co-‐‑evolution. Consequently, by the
Tertiary Age (approximately 70 million years ago) many flowering plants had
specialised their nectars and fragrances, as well as their seed and fruit, in an effort to
entice insects, birds, bats and land mammals to do the work of carting their seed or
pollen to suitable microenvironments elsewhere; a “smart” pollination system that gave
angiosperms an important advantage over gymnosperms which relied on wind
pollination.21
Some shrubs came to produce fat, calorie-‐‑rich fruits to attract animals. The seeds
inside needed to be scarified by stomach acids or imbedded in moisture-‐‑laden
manure to hasten germination. Others manufactured fruits with sticky, sugary
pulp that temporarily glued seeds onto fur or feathers. Hooked, horned, winged, or
barbed appendages enabled other fruits to travel along on the animals’ fetlocks,
landing them in distant locations.22
In all of these cases we encounter instances of co-‐‑evolution. A carrion flower certainly
would not be what it is today without the particular insects that it has evolved with. In
returning to this period, however, my purpose has been to introduce the single “seed
thought” that Nabhan offers when he says:
In one way, a retrospect on this evolution must humble us. Few of the edible,
nutritional characteristics of the seed plants that now sustain us evolved for our
benefit, under selective pressure from our forebears or through conscious breeding
by scientists. We are literally living off the fruits of other creatures’ labors -‐‑ those of
the birds, bugs, and beasts that loosely coevolved with seed plants over the last
hundred million years.23
Without wanting to diminish the significance of the considerable changes to plants that
have occurred since agriculture began, this point must remind us that we are always
entering the evolutionary story of crop plants late – whether we enter with the gatherers
of seeds, the first planters of seeds, or even with those genetically engineering plants
and their seeds today (a point that we might do well to reflect on more seriously before
granting patents for the “invention” of a plant24).
Companion species
While agricultural plants have very clearly been changed through their
relationships with humans, they have also been involved in a range of other co-‐‑
evolutionary relationships with non-‐‑humans. Here, all parties act and are acted upon
and changed; none are able to occupy a place outside of the body and world-‐‑making
action. While humans might have ideas about how they would like to change plants,
these ideas too arise within these networks of interaction, and these changes are only
ever realised “in the flesh” when diverse agencies come together, each adding their own
contribution to the way in which bodies take form.
Thinking along these lines, Haraway has used the notion of “companion species”
to mark particularly close and important/formative relationships within these biosocial
environments. This is a far broader category than that of “companion animals”. In the
human evolutionary context, for example, companion species might include “such
organic beings as rice, bees, tulips, and intestinal flora, all of who make life for humans
what it is -‐‑ and vice versa”.25 In the case of agricultural crops themselves, through often
very complex and drawn out practices of selecting plants with desirable traits, as well as
through encouraging mingling with “wild” varieties, humans have been contributing in
an important way to the emergence of a great deal of biodiversity for thousands of years
now. From the incredible varieties of tomatoes grown in Mexico at the time of Cortes’
invasion, to the 20,000 varieties of soybeans that have emerged over roughly the past
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4,500 years, and the spectacular diversity of corn of various colours and sizes still grown
throughout much of central and north America, agriculture has contributed to a
flourishing of plant diversity that is beautifully evident in the colourful pages of any
heirloom seed catalogue.26 The fact that one must now look to an heirloom seed catalogue
in order to see this diversity is a sad reflection of the current state of human/plant
agricultural relations.
As already noted, however, despite the conventional rhetoric of domestication,
these plants were not the only ones changed in these relationships. Amongst humans,
new forms of life and ways of living emerged in these agricultural environments. It is
simply impossible to predict how different humans and our lives might have been if
these relationships had never taken hold. Different, however, not just in terms of
religion, science, education (in short, those things usually termed “culture”), but also in
terms of nutrition, immune systems, and more general health and fitness. Helen M.
Leach has, for example, argued on the basis of skeletal and other anatomical
characteristics that humans might be understood as having been “domesticated”
themselves in a significant sense.27
This point should remind us that the emergence of agriculture has also had
profound consequences for many creatures that are not directly involved in it at all.
Pollan, only partly jokingly, suggests that we might “think of agriculture as something
the grasses did to people to conquer the trees”.28 In addition to the interesting
possibilities that Pollan offers here for thinking about agency in agricultural
relationships, he reminds us that there have been winners and losers beyond both
humans and crops in both historical and contemporary manifestations of agriculture –
forests very often being a good example of the latter.
In adopting the language of “companion species” Haraway insists that we must
learn to both see, and be accountable for, the ways in which all of the diverse parties
involved live and die in these relationships. Companion species are about the messy, co-‐‑
constitutive and ongoing, interactions that have made, and continue to make, both “us”
and these significant others who we are – for better or worse. Acknowledging companion
species is about paying attention to “significant otherness” across constructed divides
like the natural and the cultural, or the wild and the domestic; it is about learning to tell
the stories of these sites in new ways, ways that might allow us to see new possibilities
for more sustainable futures for everyone.
In particular, focusing attention on these companionate relationships provides us
with new ways of understanding how people and plants might get on with each other.
Companion species relationships enact a world in which people and plants emerge,
always already entangled with each other, in co-‐‑constitutive relationship. These stories
allow us to imagine human/crop relationships within a different framework, and in so
doing nurture other possibilities for living together. Here, plants are not simply about
food or the provision of other material requirements. Rather, plants are woven into the
very fabric of human life – ways of living arise in and through relationship with more-‐‑
than-‐‑human environments. These are relationships of human/crop co-‐‑becoming; of
work, play, curiosity and love, to name but a few factors, in which everyone is changed
and worlds are made.
Notes
1. University of New South Wales.
2. S.R. Gliessman (1998), Agroecology: Ecological Processes in Sustainable Agriculture, Ann Arbor Press Chelsea,
MI, p. 193.
3. B.D. Smith (1995), The Emergence of Agriculture, Scientific American Library, New York, p. 18.
4. Ibid., p. 23
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5. Ibid., p. 22.
6. Ibid., pp. 21-‐‑25.
7. Ibid., pp. 23-‐‑34.
8. Ibid., p. 23.
9. D. Quist and I.H. Chapela (2001), "ʺTransgenic DNA introgressed into traditional maize landraces in
Oaxaca, Mexico"ʺ, Nature, 414 (29 November).
10. S. Jones (1999), Darwin'ʹs Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated, Random House, New York, p. 24.
11. C. Darwin (1959), The Origin of Species. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, §209.
12. T. Ingold (2000), "ʺBuilding, dwelling, living: How animals and people make themselves at home in the
world"ʺ and "ʺMaking things, growing plants, raising animals and bringing up children"ʺ, in The Perception
of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, London & New York.
13. D. Haraway (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Prickly
Paradigm Press, Chicago, p. 31.
14. A.L. Tsing (forthcoming), "ʺUnruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species"ʺ, in S. Ghamari-‐‑Tabrizi
(ed), Thinking with Donna Haraway, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, ms p. 4.
15. On this topic, see Ingold’s work on “weaving”: T. Ingold (2000), "ʺOn weaving a basket"ʺ, in The Perception
of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, London & New York.
16. M. Hall (2011), Plants as Persons: A Philsophical Botany, SUNY Press, Albany, NY.
17. J. Diamond (1997), Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company, New
York & London, pp. 116-‐‑117.
18. R.A. Hynes and A.K. Chase (1982), "ʺPlants, Sites and Domiculture: Aboriginal Influence upon Plant
Communities in Cape York Penninsula"ʺ, Archaeology in Oceania, 17.
19. G.P. Nabhan (1989), Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation, North Point
Press, San Francisco.
20. Ibid., p. 8.
21. Ibid., pp. 6-‐‑9.
22. Ibid., p. 9.
23. Ibid., p. 6.
24. T. van Dooren (2008), "ʺInventing Seed: The Nature/s of Intellectual Property in Plants"ʺ, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 26(4).
25. D. Haraway (2003), op. cit., p. 15.
26. Native Seeds/SEARCH (2005), "ʺNative Seeds/SEARCH -‐‑ About Us."ʺ Website: http://www.nativeseeds.org
(Accessed 22 August 2005).
27. H.M. Leach (2003), "ʺHuman Domestication Reconsidered"ʺ, Current Anthropology, 44(3).
28. M. Pollan (2001), The Botany of Desire: A Plant'ʹs-‐‑Eye view of the World, Random House, New York, p. xxi.
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