Do Plants Practice Grid Computing?

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to Nature, plants appear to 'think' and seem to optimize their 'breathing' by conducting simple calculations through a distributed computing scheme. "David Peak and co-workers at Utah State University in Logan say that plants may regulate their uptake and loss of gases by 'distributed computation' -- a kind of information processing that involves communication between many interacting units." Nature adds this is similar to signals exchanged by ants to find the best source of food for an ant community. In their paper, the researchers added that their results were "consistent with the proposition that a plant solves its optimal gas exchange problem through an emergent, distributed computation performed by its leaves." This overview contains more details and references. It also includes a picture of the tiny pores on the surface of a cactus leaf, called stomata, which permit the plant to breathe when they're opened."

Comments

Do eukaryotic cells practice grid computing?

[hawkfish]

If one thinks of quantum computing as a kind of parallelism, then maybe so.

Re:Do eukaryotic cells practice grid computing?

[wwest4]

other interesting philosophically-related items:

- panpsychism

- supervenience of mind on the brain

- the qualia problem (the crux of the mind-brain problem)

what i find interesting is the idea that what we call is a feature of all systems, and that qualia constitute the condition of being a system - and furthermore, that the reason other systems seem to have varying degrees of sentience has more to do with scale, perspective and apparent similarity than with some ill-defined threshold of consciousness.

Evolved?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could someone shed some light on how complex systems like this might have evolved? Especially with species that are dependant on each other... plant pollination for example. It would be extremely unlikely that bees and flowers would have mutated perfectly at the percise exact time in order to make this happen correctly.

Sometimes the creationists' theory doesn't seem too far off wack.

Re:Evolved?

[Junado]

Actually, the first plants started using water to move their "seeds": it was more like some kind of sperm that male plants would release into water in hope they would reach female ovules. This was the very first method used by plants to reproduce (actually, we, humans, are using this exact same method). Next they used the wind to move their pollen around and finally, as you said, they're using bugs, which are very efficient since they move from plant to plant, carrying the pollen from a plant to the other without much lost.

Re:Evolved?

[AlecC]

The answer is - bit by bit. It is a fallacy to think that systems need to jump from state A to state B without passing through any ointermediate states. Flowers probably originally pollinated by the wind, for their own purpises, and bees originally raided flowers without concern for the flowers need. But the bees accidentally distributed the pollen better than the wind, so flowers that got pollinated by bees did better than those that didn't. An flowers that produced an excesss of sweet sap attracted more bees than those that didn't (a) got more bees and (b) got less pollen eaten, because the bees took the cheaper sap. And bees that worked out which kind of plants gave away this sweet sap ate better than those that didn't. And flowers that learmed to signal "Hey, I've got honey" go more than those which had honey and didn't advertise. And bes which learned to depend upon a slower which was successful (in part because they pollinated it) did better than those that didn't.

Evolution doesn't take flying leaps. It takes hundreds and thousands of tiny steps. All that it requres to get from A to B is that there is a continuous path from A to B, and that every single step along that path, however tiny, moves just a tiny bit closer to B.

Somebody has moddeled the formation of the eye from, essentially, blank skin, evolving through sensitive skin, a "visual pit", a simple cover over the pit, to developing the lens and focussing mechanism as we see it. This took something like 100,000 steps. And for each of those steps, the proto-eye that formed was just a tiny bit better than the one before and would therefore have benefitted its owner just a tiny bit. Of course, these steps would onlynhave happened very occasionally. But if a step only happened every 100 generations, and there were one generation a year (slow for insects and other small animals) to is only 10 million years - yasterday to geologists.

What doubters of evolution often don't realise is how tiny an advantage evolution can work on over enough generations. A 1% advantage is much more than enough spread through a whole population. If it is a 1% advantage ofer the whole range, the species advances (avolves) as a whole. If it is a 1% advantage in some areas not others (e.g. cold tolerance favours those at the cold end of the range) the species will split into two lines which will specialise in different areas.

To get on topic as to how this particular trait might have evolve, look at the largest grid we know - the world economy. This didn't spring to life in one leap. It evolved from very local communication (I give you meat, you give me sex), neigbourly communication (I give you meat, you give me axeheads), distant communications (I give you silver, you give me spices) to abstract communications (I give you green paper, you give me insurance policy) in many stages. You cannot pinpoint where "the economy" started. But it wasn't around 10,000 years ago, and it is around now.

Re:Evolved?

[Scrameustache]

Tell me, are you the same troll that ask that same question in every single biology-related science thread? Or is there a beowulf clusters of you?

It would be extremely unlikely that bees and flowers would have mutated perfectly at the percise exact time in order to make this happen correctly

Why would they mutate at the same time, or perfectly?

Proto-bees used plants as food source, wich had the side effect of helping those very plants reproduce by bringing sexual material from plant to plant. Plants that mutated in ways that made this less likely did not benefit from it and were replaced by plants that mutated in ways that helped it (by making them easier to find, say by having bright colors). Rinse, repeat, you get plants that have evolved to use bees as sexual carriers.

While this is going on, bees that mutated in a way that reduced pollination had smaller food sources than the bees that mutated in a way that helped it (hairy legs that carry more pollen). The hairy-legged bees had more food-giving plants around their hives, and so on.

Now its your turn.
Tell me: if there is only one god and he created all life at once and then wiped it all off except what Noah could fit in his floating barn. Why weren't there any wallabies in mesopotamia? How did they all get back to the other side of the world after the flood without anyone ever noticing them along the way?
And how did they get from oceania to mesopotamia in the first place?
If your god could teleport of fly them from one continent to the other, why would he need an ark at all? He could just levitate them during the flood, or create a flood-free bubble around them, or give them all gills for 2 months, being omnipotent and all...why even bother with an ark?

see also: Microbiology

[Harmotech]

Bacterial colonies will also exhibit a "thinking" behaviour. Individual bacter will respond to stimuli one of two ways: motility toward the stimulus, or a kind of rolling motion which will modify thier direction to move away from the stimulus. This individual action of "thought" utilized by an unfathomable quantity of generations of bacteria has proven its worth. Is this thinking? Maybe, maybe not. This isn't philosophy class... The point is that all forms of life can be divided into discreet units that display often surprising emergent properties when allowed to interact. Cooperation and communication between individual cells (and components of cells) in the human body is the reason you can sit here and read this post...

Re:It surely isn't thinking...

[bar-agent]

Interestingly, a plant getting damaged will emit chemicals into the air. When other plants detect these chemicals, they will up their production of insect- and fungi-deterrents.

Acacia Tree Communication

[handy_vandal]

"Acacia trees produce tannin in their leaves when browsed by animals. The tannin tastes so bad that the animal stops eating this acacia tree. Other acacia trees downwind sense that tannin is being produced. These trees quickly produce tannin, thus discouraging the animals from eating these trees too."

- Source

-kgj

Re:Cellular Automata

[Urkki]

• Makes me wonder if forests also act like this as well ... forests are very old, in fact the rainforests of Australia have existed since well before the breakup of Gondwana and are probably 100 million years old and trees do signal one another via chemical messages I recall.

Check out Gaia Theory. And no, it's not some metaphysical or spiritual "Earth has a soul" type crap, but rather something like this tree thing in the article, except on global scale, and across species. The basic idea is that life on Earth not only passively affects Earth's biosphere while living in it, but actually regulates it (slowly, over long perioids of time) to create and maintain optimal environment for itself. For example our atmosphere is chemically quite unstable, yet almost unchanging over long long perioids of time. Is it just accident it stays almost stable, not varying from one extreme to other, or is there a more complex global mechanism?

Re:A bit about cactus stomata

[CactusCritter]

There is one aspect of cactus group phasing whose genetic basis has not been worked out.

The plants of seemingly any given species of cactus will all bloom concurrently, an obvious necessity for reproduction. This occurs within different populations a great distance apart.

Seemingly, it has to be dependent on length of day, perhaps temperature range, too. However, the genetics have not yet been determined. Cactus genetic studies seem thus far to be limited to working out the sometimes confusing relationships between genera and, in some cases, species.

There no need for networking which is only a concept in the mind of human observers-interpreters.

Re:Stomata?

[Agar]

I was just making a bad pun.

The more common usage of the term "stigmata" is roughly, "marks or bleeding sores resembling the wounds received by Jesus, spontaneously appearing on the hands, feet, brow and side of very devoted followers."

The picture I linked to is a cactus that looks like a Christian cross. A holy cactus. It has open holes...stomata...stigmata...

Sigh.

By the way, aren't the "little balls that hold the pollen" called "testicles"?