The Wood Wide Web
The Infinite Monkey Cage
BBC
4.7 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2022
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by Ted Lasso's Brendan Hunt, Professor of forest ecology and author of "The Mother Tree", Suzanne Simard and botanist Mark Spencer to discover how trees and plants communicate and what they are saying. Suzanne's incredible discovery that trees form a wood wide web of communication has changed our entire understanding of forests and how they work. With the help of amazing fungi, this incredible network of communication allows the trees and plants in a forest to pass information backwards and forwards to help protect themselves against predators and optimize resource. Incredibly, this could even be viewed as a form of intelligence. Brian and Robin find out how this should change the way we look at all plants, and in particular how we manage our forests and discover some of the secrets of those whispering trees.
Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.9 | Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage. |
| 0:06.3 | I'm Professor Brian Cox, |
| 0:07.5 | President's Medal for the Institute of Physics 2012. |
| 0:10.7 | And I'm Robert Inz, Advanced Cycling Proficiency Badge 1987. |
| 0:15.1 | One of the great philosophical questions is, |
| 0:17.9 | if a tree falls in a forest, but no one is there to hear it, |
| 0:21.5 | does it make a sound? |
| 0:22.9 | No, isn't? |
| 0:23.9 | What? You just define sound correctly, |
| 0:26.0 | and the answer's yes. |
| 0:27.9 | No, OK, that took me a lot less time than I imagined. |
| 0:31.7 | You could probably be quite useful for the world of philosophy, |
| 0:33.8 | because I mean spending ages on that. |
| 0:35.5 | I'll tell you what, I'll give you another one then. |
| 0:37.0 | Why is there something rather than nothing? |
| 0:39.2 | Well, again, you have to address your unspoken assumptions, |
| 0:42.2 | don't you? |
| 0:43.2 | Assuming nothing is more likely than something, |
| 0:45.2 | otherwise it's not surprising. |
| 0:47.4 | You're right, so it's really the fault of my pessimism, isn't it? |
| 0:50.6 | That's the... |
... |
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