[unwind]

I totally agree about the annoyingness of the intro/outro, but what is the difference in your opinion between things being "grown by the tree" and "extracted from the soil"?

Isn't that all trees (and, dare I say it, most other living organisms) do: extract atoms from the soil (and the surrounding air, of course), and grow themselves from those?

[StavrosK]

The difference is that they don't synthesize the gold, just move it. Gold grows on trees like apples grow on a shopper.

[thaumasiotes]

Well, gold is an element. By this standard, the only way to describe something as "growing" gold would be if it produced it by nuclear fusion.

There's an alternative perspective... the trees are growing gold in the same way that leaves, bark, hair, claws, etc. are grown. Anything a tree does could be described as "growing". The fact that they leave the gold in the same state they get it doesn't really bear on the fact that growing is what trees do.

If, hypothetically, I created a rose breed that naturally gilded its own petals, I guarantee that everyone would describe that as "growing". But they still wouldn't be synthesizing the gold, just moving it. Your intuitions have gone astray somewhere.

Now, the things I listed as examples of things that are grown are all somewhat discrete entities, which is also true of my hypothetical self-gilding roses and is not true of the gold in this article. But synthesizing gold doesn't come into it.

[StavrosK]

Well, first of all, bark doesn't just exist in free form in the ground and get moved to the tree, it's synthesized from the CO2 in the air (I'm no plantologist, so this may be overly simplified).

However, the difference isn't in the "grow" part, it's in the "gold" part. If you tell someone "I've found a plant that grows gold", their reaction won't be "wow, what an interesting mechanism", it will be "holy shit, we're rich!".

If you want apples, you plant an apple tree, then you grow apples for free. By that analogy, if you want gold, you plant one of these trees, and get gold for free, which doesn't hold, because you'll never get more gold than how much you put in.

[thaumasiotes]

> By that analogy, if you want gold, you plant one of these trees, and get gold for free, which doesn't hold, because you'll never get more gold than how much you put in.

This isn't true, in the same way that it's not true that a gold mine will never give you any more gold than you put into the mine in the first place. There's already gold in the ground.

[StavrosK]

That's why we don't say that a gold mine grows gold.