Playing with the seed of Randomness
The photo is Astilbe arendsii Paul Gaarder, a beautiful flowery Astilbe plant that carry the name after my grandfather Paul Gaarder that first discovered this particular Astilbe plant. He did not directly develop this plant, but as I understand he was playing with the seed of randomness. In plant seeds there are some type of randomness and some type of deterministic process that results in a great variety of plants produced by seeds. Then if one experiments with many seeds from the same plant (plant family) one will get many different outcomes, some more probable than others. If one keeps doing this over an over one can suddenly come over a particular nice variety (a beautiful tail event), this is basically what my grandfather did. Then after finding a nice variety the plant could be copied by cloning, that is simply dividing the plant and you have a genetic copy. Cloning in the plant farming business is probably at least 1000 of years old? Or actually many plants also clone themselves naturally in the nature.
Everyone should have an Astilbe arendsii Paul Gaarder in their garden! It gives great Feng Shui.
Plant seeds are like a dice with an very large (astronomical) amount of different sides (outcomes).
Cloning is a way to cheat the randomness process. One of my first businesses as a teenager was to produce Iris plants by cloning.
