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Plants including trees are important in mythology and religion, where they symbolise themes such as fertility, growth, immortality and rebirth, and may be more or less magical. [114] [115] Thus in Latvian mythology, Austras koks is a tree which grows from the start of the Sun's daily journey across the sky.
Plants in culture – uses of plants by humans; Narcissus in culture – uses of narcissus flowers by humans; Lime tree in culture – uses of the lime (linden) tree by humans; Rose symbolism – a more expansive list of symbolic meanings of the rose
The plant Arabidopsis thaliana is used in laboratories as a model organism to understand how genes control the growth and development of plant structures. [25] NASA predicts that space stations or space colonies will one day rely on plants for life support. [26] Scientific advances in genetic engineering led to developments in crops.
Plant physiology encompasses all the internal chemical and physical activities of plants associated with life. [155] Chemicals obtained from the air, soil and water form the basis of all plant metabolism. The energy of sunlight, captured by oxygenic photosynthesis and released by cellular respiration, is the basis of almost all life.
Edward Hitchcock's fold-out paleontological chart in his 1840 Elementary Geology. Although tree-like diagrams have long been used to organise knowledge, and although branching diagrams known as claves ("keys") were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural order was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" (Botanical Tree) of the French ...
However, the prevailing view is that, the Somb was the first tree on Earth and the progenitor of plant life. [48] [49] The Somb was also used in the Serer tumuli and burial chambers, many of which have survived for more than a thousand years. [48] Thus, Somb is not only the tree of life in Serer society but the symbol of immortality. [48]
Positivistic ideas about the meaning of 'nature', 'life', and 'personhood' misdirected these previous attempts to understand the local concepts. Classical theoreticians (it is argued) attributed their own modernist ideas of self to 'primitive peoples' while asserting that the 'primitive peoples' read their idea of self into others!
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis , organisation , metabolism , growth , adaptation , response to stimuli , and reproduction .