Why Trees Grow Tall and How to Kill a Zombie

Why Trees Grow Tall and How to Kill a Zombie

The human heart is in the thoracic cavity, enclosed and protected by the rib cage.  This is somewhere about the middle of the sixth portion of the human body, assuming Leonardo DaVinci’s math for the perfect human form, is correct.  According to his Vesuvius Man, this perfect ratio is seven times the height of the head.

Now, the body dies if the heart does not pump blood –almost.  Since all body functions are controlled by the brain and the brain is above the level of the heart; if we are to accept gravity as a given, how can a person still be brain dead and yet remain alive – or in this case undead?  O-o-o-h.  The undead….

So what exactly is osmosis?  Wikipedia is all over the place on this one.  Basically when it comes down to it, the Wiki geniuses leave it to the American Emergency Medical Response people, who define it as, “salt sucks”.  Hmmm…  And a whole bunch of math and other magical theories of science (a.k.a. facts) … mostly saying water moves between cell walls according to pressure being exerted, without the use of energy. 

Straight up – nature is not kind.  Evolution requires –requires – every living thing to compete with every other living thing to stay alive.  And, when threatened, if no other option is available, living things will adapt, invent or take the long road and evolve to beat out competitors.  Of course the first thing they want to do once they are alive, is the egotistical act of making more things like themselves, or reproduce.

Trees grow tall because they want all the sunshine they can get to feed themselves.  Each species of trees will tend to get as tall as they have to, to choke out all the other trees before those other trees grab the open sky.  Trees try to kill other trees.  Trees can develop, and often do, various means to poison insects that threaten them.  Trees can, and do, make alliances with certain insects and fungi and other organisms to deal with even worse interlopers.

And using the concept of osmosis, trees do all this without expending, or utilizing actual energy.  Because salt sucks?  Well kind of.  This is all less complicated than it sounds, or we as lay-scientists are led to believe.  Are trees, then, actually alive? Of course – except when they are dead or no longer alive.  Trees have to have fluids, nutrients, some form of creating and expelling energy, which, apparently, they have no use for.  (?)

But how do they do this without using, utilizing energy.  Are they zombies?  Good question.  Now Wikitheorem is all over the board on this one too.  It all depends on where you want to start and where you draw the line. 

If you take the African folklore route, you get a living person who is made into a sort of slave to a sort of magician, folk doctor, medicine man.  This is done using natural pharmacology (plants, herbs, bat wings, eyes-of-newt  … whatever), making them a kind of a loping, salivating slob doing whatever the witch (some say this is always done by a witch) commands them.

If you take the Haitian, Voodoo, route you get an “animated corpse”.  Or a dead person brought back to life.  And, most authoritative of all, there is the Hollywood route.  (You know you can always trust Hollywood to get the facts straight.  Right?  You do know that?)  Where zombies are made by some incredible virus.  A virus that somehow just animates itself and infects people, who bite other people because they crave human flesh – in particular brains.  The modern fact is that zombies need to eat human brains. (?)

Remember the human heart and where it’s located?  (About three quarters up the trunk of the human body.)  Without the heart pumping blood up to the human brain, it dies.  The human body does produce energy, which it uses through a number of processes to make the heart work and pump this blood.

A tree does not have a heart, but still without using energy, a tree using magical processes of physics (essentially) sucks nutrients up its trunk in order to outcompete the surrounding vegetation by growing taller. 

Whether you accept the African, Haitian (Voodoo) or Hollywood version (I am partial to the Voodoo version – I mean it makes the most sense scientifically.) in any case we know that a zombie is brain dead.  Because it is undead or pharmacologically no longer aware or in control of thought or its actions.  Sort of living brain dead, not in need of energy (like a tree).  So a zombie doesn’t need a heart.

However, in any version of our discussion, our zombie does apparently, need brains.

Why else would it crave having to eat them? (Hollywood)  So how does a zombie eat human brains?  Well, obviously it has to have teeth and/or a mouth, I suppose it could suck or gum them down even without teeth.  … Okay, it has to have a mouth.

Remove access to the mouth and the zombie is going to be dead dead.  So there you have it.  Cut off his head and he doesn’t have a mouth to eat anything, brains or whatever.  I think you probably already knew that, I just wanted to be clear on the history and science of the whole topic.

“Knowledge is power.”

Subject for another blog; wooden stakes and vampires?  Maybe.

Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014