Tue, Jun-18-24, 07:49
|
 |
Senior Member
Posts: 2,060
|
|
Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000
BF:
Progress: 50%
|
|
This is an article that talks about plant intelligence:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/und...ientific-change
It gets into a lot of controversial info about how plants do what they do, because some of what they can do is quite remarkable for something that vegans believe has no feelings, no self awareness, or awareness of anything around them:
Quote:
uring the nineteen-seventies and eighties, a researcher at the University of Washington started noticing something strange in the college’s experimental forest. For years, a blight of caterpillars had been munching the trees to death. Then, suddenly, the caterpillars themselves started dying off. The forest was able to recover. But what had happened to the caterpillars? The researcher, David Rhoades, who had a background in chemistry and zoology, found that the trees in the forest had changed the chemistry of their leaves, to the detriment of the caterpillars. Even more surprising, trees that had been nibbled by caterpillars weren’t the only ones that had changed their chemistry. Some were changing their leaves before caterpillars reached them, as if they’d received a warning. A shocking possibility presented itself: the trees were signalling to one another. Zoë Schlanger recounts Rhoades’s story in her new book, “The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.” In a research paper that Rhoades published on his findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society’s series “Plant Resistance to Insects,” he pointed out that the trees were too far apart to be communicating through their roots. This suggested a possibility so novel that Rhoades couldn’t resist an exclamation point in his otherwise cautious positing—the trees seemed to be using “airborne pheromonal substances!” That paper, Schlanger writes, “would change everything, and in a cruel twist, it would end his career. Because, back then, no one believed him.”
The contemporary world of botany that Schlanger explores in “The Light Eaters” is still divided over the matter of how plants sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate. But, in the past twenty years, the idea that plants communicate has gained broader acceptance. Research in recent decades has shown garden-variety lima beans protecting themselves by synthesizing and releasing chemicals to summon the predators of the insects that eat them; lab-grown pea shoots navigating mazes and responding to the sound of running water; and a chameleonic vine in the jungles of Chile mimicking the shape and color of nearby plants by a mechanism that’s not yet understood.
Schlanger acknowledges that some of the research yields as many questions as answers. It’s not clear how the vine gathers information about surrounding plants to perform its mimicry, or what exactly that ability says about plants’ ability to sense the world around them. And not all of the research is equally sound—the pea-shoot study, for example, performed in 2016 by the ecologist Monica Gagliano, who has written about communicating with plants while taking ayahuasca, is particularly controversial, and a replication effort was not successful. But an increasing number of scientists has begun to ask the question that animates her book: Are plants intelligent?
Schlanger’s own introduction to the notion that plants might be able to exhibit behavior at all came when she learned that male ferns release sperm that swim in rainwater; emerging research indicated that they emit a hormone to sabotage other nearby fern sperm in order to outcompete them. It’s already clear that plants have amazing biological capabilities: they respond to light, and react in sophisticated ways to seasonal changes, waiting for the right combination of warmth and water to grow or flower. Plants have also been shown to respond to sound—the beach evening primrose, a small yellow flower, makes its nectar sweeter when played a recording of a flying honeybee. A recurrent theme of Schlanger’s book is the challenge of categorizing such abilities in comparison with our own. Primroses may respond to sound—but that doesn’t mean that they “hear” the way that we do. As Schlanger writes, they have a version of “earless” hearing: “Sound, to them, is pure vibration.”
A pattern emerges in her survey of the field. The scientists Schlanger visits show her the plant versions of the building blocks of intelligence: sensation, communication, decision-making. Rhoades wasn’t able to convince the field that the trees were sending one another caterpillar warnings, but, not long after his paper, another study—this one in the controlled confines of a lab—had found that maple saplings changed their leaf composition when neighboring trees’ leaves were torn. In a lab in Wisconsin, Schlanger pinches the leaf of an Arabidopsis plant, and sees its veins light up under a microscope in “a bioluminescent ripple” of a wave of sensation. It seems to Schlanger that, by pinching the lab plant, she will cause it pain, and be partaking in “a vegetal version of the Milgram shock experiment.” One of the scientists running the experiment, Simon Gilroy, offers a nuanced description of the system; the ripple looks similar to an animal’s nervous system but is actually a set of “conduits of cells that could allow propagation of an electrical change that a plant uses for information.” Plants don’t have brains; they don’t have neurons. But they might have structures that function similarly.
~snip~
|
To give an idea of just how controversial the subject is:
Quote:
One researcher, who studies the ways that plants turn mechanical stimuli into chemical signals—which is to say, how they respond to touch—replies to Schlanger’s question as to whether a plant’s body might function as a brain, with, “I think you’re right, I just don’t talk about it.” Another says that she doesn’t want to be quoted at all if she’s going to be lumped in with the “ ‘plant intelligence’ people” and proceeds only when Schlanger promises nuance. A third dives right in, using the boldest terms to describe plant intelligence—he’s “senior enough,” he tells her, that he doesn’t have to worry. Schlanger’s personal narrative gives the story its frame—we learn up front that when she started her research she was a jaded climate reporter, and through her immersion in plant science she rediscovers an appreciation of nature. But the book’s power comes from showing a field in flux and reminding us that ideas have their own life cycles: from crackpot theory to utter embarrassment to real possibility to the stuff of textbooks. A third dives right in, using the boldest terms to describe plant intelligence—he’s “senior enough,” he tells her, that he doesn’t have to worry. Schlanger’s personal narrative gives the story its frame—we learn up front that when she started her research she was a jaded climate reporter, and through her immersion in plant science she rediscovers an appreciation of nature. But the book’s power comes from showing a field in flux and reminding us that ideas have their own life cycles: from crackpot theory to utter embarrassment to real possibility to the stuff of textbooks.
The tension inherent in that process is evident in Schlanger’s negotiations with her sources. She describes the way she’d plan her interviews, the rhetorical “dance” she choreographed so as not to set off alarm bells. “I began to learn what to say—or, more accurately, not say—to keep a scientist on the phone. ‘Plant sensing’ was generally fine, neutral territory. ‘Plant behavior’ crept into more risky territory, and ‘plant intelligence’ could be outright dangerous. Consciousness, I learned, I must only bring up once I’d made it through the crucible of each of these prior descriptors without feeling I might be hung up on or scolded. When I hit on a trigger word, I sensed it immediately.” Even seemingly subtle distinctions, such as the choice to use “sensing” rather than “behavior,” are loaded with meaning, each word ascribing to its speaker a different level of interpretation and each representing a step toward terrain once reserved exclusively for humans. “Sensing” isn’t so far from a simple response to a stimulus; “behavior” introduces the possibility of choice; “intelligence” takes us into the world of problem-solving and agency; “consciousness” brings us to awareness of the self and others, a threshold of what makes us human. “Over and over, I saw the debate framed as a dispute over syntax,” Schlanger writes. “But it looked to me more of a dispute over worldview. Over the nature of reality. Over what plants were, particularly in contrast to ourselves.”
Are plants intelligent? It doesn’t just depend on whom you ask, but what you mean by the term. Schlanger proposes several ways of describing intelligence, all of which apply to both humans and plants: the ability to communicate, the transmission of information via electrochemistry, the ability to respond to the threats and opportunities that the world presents. By design, these definitions stretch the definition of intelligence beyond what we’re used to—for Schlanger, that’s part of the appeal. A key lesson of studying plant intelligence, she suggests, referencing Pollan, is that perhaps we should rethink our own.
|
So who is most threatened by the idea that plants might "sense" things, "behave" in a certain way Or actually be "intelligent" much less have "consciousness"?
While I'm pretty sure these concepts are a bit mind blowing to the scientific community as a whole, my guess is that vegans and vegetarians will have their world blown apart to the very core of their belief system. They can't bring themselves to eat animals/animal products all because animals are sentient, have intelligence, and they're living beings. If plants are being shown to have sentience, intelligence, and consciousness, that makes them more like animals than not like animals. Plants just have a different source for obtaining nourishment, sensing and sending out signals than animals do.
This is the final line in the article:
Quote:
|
I found myself returning often to the epigraph of Schlanger’s book, a quote from an ethnobotanist that could stand as a pithy reply to the question of whether plants are intelligent: “They can eat light, isn’t that enough?”
|
|
|
Linear Mode
