Solitary Desert Plants: How Do They Survive?

@Ryan S

I think this is the time that someone steps forward and claims that we live in a non-deterministic Universe because quantum mechanics somehow proves there's randomization, or some such nonsense.

Though, I'm in agreement with you. Your phrasing was well done and quite artful.

Really though - it's no more of an anthropomoprhism than attributing the same properties to humans. Don't take this as a troll, but it seems like the defining difference between anthropomorphic attributions and otherwise is the temporal relation of causal events. According to a naive realist outlook the human self or ego is a causative agent who "intends" to do something and then does it, so the self is a kind of causeless first-cause, or a "free-willing" entity, who is otherwise cut-off from the causal nexus that permeates the universe. This sense seems to be what separates anthropomorphic attributes from everything else, but this also amounts to a homunculus problem. On the other hand if we accept that human beings are as much a part of the causal continuum as everything else, then our anthropomorphic attributes are even erroneously applied to ourselves. We may not "intend" to do anything at all, perhaps we do what we do as the consequence of deterministic factors, meanwhile our conscious delusion of being a causative agent is entirely a false construct.

I mean, there are plenty more reasons to believe this is the case from psychology and physics. Humans are constantly imagining ourselves to be above everything else, even the lawful regularities that bind everything together (i.e. Physics). We have "decision-making processes" but this may not be fundamentally any different than a computer algorithm arriving at different results based on different inputs.

Usually it is by poisoning the soil around them so that there is no competition.