Frank Perdomo’s Reviews > Humanish: What Talking to Your Cat or Naming Your Car Reveals About the Uniquely Human Need to Humanize > Status Update

Halfway through this book 📖 and im still longing to hear 👂 about plants & anthropomorphic behavior. BUT i know this is part of the shortcomings of Science. The author ✍️ clearly points out the bias of most researchers to limit research 🔬 to a window 🪟 that fits grants and academic calendars 📅. We will not see scientific research on trees 🌳 that take longer to grow and study 📚 well beyond our lifetime, and this difference in temporal conditions is just briefly mentioned in the context of the sloth 🦥 YET i was just reading about how Jefferson and Adams in a book 📕 about our Founding Gardeners treated the felling of trees on par with murder, i know i feel strongly about a tree cut down and others do too. There is a cultural element of life persisting past death that is also at play here, and skimming through the second half of the book i see that there will be some discussion of this, still im chocking this up to a "researcher" bias as to not placing significance in the afterlife of things, im talking about human ability to talk to clearly dead ☠️ objects, graves, ashes, etc. consulting the dead, and the religious context of afterlife surely has a major affect anthropomorphic ability.

Furthermore, plant 🪴 bias is also rooted in a difficulty in determining the extent or bounds of an individual. I think it is very hard for anyone to say where a plant starts and stops. A cultural context of individualism or individuality would also be at work here. Objects or organisms that cannot clearly show segments or liminal boundaries make it harder to anthropomorphize. There is more to be said about this AND this dovetails into another "researcher" bias of NOT easily being able to parse hard science with humanities, cross disciplinary thought is limited by this laser focused time sensitive researcher focus on actionable science bound by easy measurement and again time. I see now even more evidence of research geared toward materialist, mechanistic, behavioral economics: an academic researcher needs to fill a grant within a short window for another researcher to verify in a short window etc.

This all makes Science pretty limited in scope.