Kumara plicatilis joined what it couldn't beat

Long ago a Kumara plicatilis seed dropped into a rock crack here! If life gives you lemons make lemonade. If life leaves you to live among rocks, become the symbol of the hardness they represent. Painstaking adaptation and mindless sacrifice over countless generations build the systems that make parts of life look easy. Many die for every system that establishes a solution. The easy bit of living is the gift of ancient ancestors enjoyed by later generations. 

Most species did not achieve any adaptation by thinking, only by selection of the better suited individuals to live until they breed. Brain is a late arrival, an adaptation super tool. It makes faster and more complex adaptation possible, as learning speeds up the social part of evolution. As in a hive of bees or a nest of ants, the brainy individuals and their children learn by example and insight, by tools and kept records of past learning, by copying and invention, by returning to unsolved problems.

The learning point for people here crosses not only a cultural barrier but an interspecies one, taking a lesson from the plant kingdom to the animal kingdom: It is the upstanding example that spreads the courage needed by the faint of heart. K. plicatilis isn’t faint of heart.