Plants 'Recognize' Their Siblings

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that according to a recent study, Biologists have found that plants are able to recognize their own relatives. "Researchers at McMaster University have found that plants get fiercely competitive when forced to share their pot with strangers of the same species, but they're accommodating when potted with their siblings. [...] Though they lack cognition and memory, the study shows plants are capable of complex social behaviours such as altruism towards relatives, says Dudley. Like humans, the most interesting behaviours occur beneath the surface."

Comments

Or...

[ArcherB]

Maybe they can't recognize siblings at all. Maybe the genetics are close enough so that the plant can not distinguish its own root from that of its siblings.

Just a thought.

Re:Or...

[Jarjarthejedi]

Exactly. Why are we so quick to jump to conclusions about plants and animals being the same as humans now a days anyways? So a plant doesn't respond as vigorously when another plant with a similar genome is in the pot with it...how exactly is that altruism? Last I checked altruism was sacrificing something for the benefit of another. These plants aren't giving anything up in this case...it's more like plants are extremely protective/territorial to plants different from themselves and less so with plants like them. The absence of selfishness != altruism...

I mean, first posted comment is a perfectly plausible alternate theory, why isn't that even considered in the article? Could it be, gasp, that saying that plants recognize and display altruism towards siblings gets more reads than that plants have displayed abnormal behavior towards those with similar genomes? This seems an awful lot like hyperbole to get more reads, or, to not attribute to malice what could be simple ignorance, perhaps it's simply that they thought people wouldn't understand it without something in normal life to compare it too...

Re:Or...

[plunge]

I dunno, the usage seems mostly legitimate to me. The plants ARE toning down their normal aggressive behaviors, the ones that allow them to compete for scarce resources with other plants. No one is saying that the plants have feelings for their kin, but it makes perfect sense that they'd show some form of kin selection. It makes no real sense to just call it a "mistake" or a "confusion" because plants don't have intentions.

Most human altruism appears to be from the same source: it began as something we extended to kin groups, and extended to others only as civilization developed further. I don't see what the value of calling it "abnormal" or a "mistake." It's a behavior that seems to help the species and does what it does regardless of how it came about.

Re:Or...

[Rei]

Yeah, cue the vegetarian/vegan bashing with "argumentum ad absurdum".

I could much more easily go in the other direction.

Would you eat pigs, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat dogs/cats, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat dolphins, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat lemurs, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat organutangs, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat chimpanzees, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat genetically 50/50 human/chimpanzee crosses, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat 90/10 human/chimpanzee crosses, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat 100% humans, slaughtered industrially for meat?

Where's your ethical cutoff point? Why? I'd wager that it's a lot more arbitrary than my "the less functional neurons, the better" cutoff. Of course plants interact with their surroundings. Even unicellular organisms are remarkably complex systems with all kinds of feedback. But they're relatively easy to model. How many neurons do you think it would take, in an artificial neural net, to modify an arbitrary plant or single-celled organism behavior -- say, which direction to grow roots? Three, four perhaps? Now how many do you think it would take to model a mouse's decision on where and how to build its den based on its' life experiences (flooding, predators, warmth, etc)? Hundreds of thousands, millions perhaps? There's really no comparison.

To put some cutoff in the nervous systems of higher animals, however, you have to come up with some new "depth of thought and/or emotion" cutoff. Do so, and defend it with references to the scientific literature. I challenge you to do so. Even a lab mouse has metacognition and problem solving abilities. They don't have *your level* of problem solving abilities, and they don't have our language hardware (and it is due to built-in wiring; read up about the "Critical Period" where, if you don't learn language before then, you lose the ability to do so). But it's still pretty much the same thing.

Re:Or...

[fitten]

Where's your ethical cutoff point? Why? I'd wager that it's a lot more arbitrary than my "the less functional neurons, the better" cutoff.

I don't feel the need to justify ethically, to myself or anyone else, my choices of food. I simply eat what I feel like eating and don't eat what I don't want to eat. I see no reason to get 'ethics' involved in the decision really... unless you count things like: I'll try not to steal food from someone else, unless my own survival depends upon it.

That being said, I support you completely in your choice to be a vegetarian (whatever flavor) or even vegan. I have no problem with your self limitations of food choice as it doesn't affect me in the least (other than potentially lessen competition for certain items I consider food, which is a good thing :)). Just return the favor and allow me my choice.

Re:Or...

[lawpoop]

Well, there is a subtle question lurking in here. If the definition of anthropomorphic means having human form or attributes, how do we know that any particularly attribute is solely human?

In other words, if I say the cat is 'afraid', in a scientific context, and you say to me, "Don't anthropomorphise that cat", how do we know that particular attribute ( the feeling of fear ) belongs solely to humans? Is it not possible that the cat has the same electro-chemical process happening in their brains that humans do when humans experience fear? Could a careless critic mistake a shared attributes between two animals species, such as both cats and human feeling fear, as a case of anthropomorphism? How are we to tell the difference between anthropomorphic reasoning and the correct identification of a characteristic between humans and another animal.

How did humans first 'own' the attribute of fearfulness that it might be considered and anthropomorphism to say that an animal is afraid? Doesn't such understanding of 'what it means to be human' actually come from our pre-scientific understanding of the world both culturally, ( as in what people believed about humans and animals in the middle ages ) and personally ( what an individual believed about humans and animals before they were exposed to scientific knowledge )?

In other words, have we scientifically validated every supposedly human attribute, so we know when we are anthropomorphising or not? I argue the answer is no. It's just an ad-hoc system that you can throw around at any time, almost entirely without guidelines, rules, or criteria. At various times we have said that animals do have emotions like humans, don't have emotions like humans, etc. None of it is really scientifically valid, because we don't have brain scans of wild animals running for their life through the jungle. Nor do we really have an electro-chemical definition of emotion, for that matter -- we know *where* in the brain it takes place, but we don't have an exact definition for the physical process of 'fear' or 'anger'. So we're not really sure if even *humans* have emotions like humans!

Re:Or...

[lawpoop]

The real problem is that we can't possibly know how it feels to feel in another species. Here's another question. Can we possibly know how it 'feels' to 'feel' in another human being? If you are going to argue it's because we are both human beings, and therefore we have the same physiology, then I would respond that technically, we don't. We are not clones or carbon copies of one another. If you then say we aren't identical, but we are close enough that the assumption is okay, then I would tell you that we share a lot of physiological structure, including the structure of the brain, with chimpanzees, even dogs -- plants and jellyfish, not so much.

This is one of the oldest questions in philosophy. How do I know that my experience of 'red' is the same as yours? There are various answers on both sides of the argument. But, if we assume or justify by reason that I know what your experience is because we are both 'human', then why can't we do the same for animals? After all, Chimpanzees have somewhere between 95%-99% simliar DNA to us; they have more or less the same brain with the same structures, minus maybe the language areas. We know that chimps don't have the language facility that humans do, but is it an anthropomorphism to say that they experience fear or anger?

For example, the limbic system in our brain somehow generates emotional experience. We don't know how it happens, nor do we have a electro-chemical definition of emotion, but we know that it's happening in the limbic system. The limbic system is structurally pretty similar in all of the great apes. So if you can say to me that you and I have the same 'kinds' of emotional experiences because we have the same limbic system, then I would tell you that you and I share our limbic structure with a chimpanzee. So then, couldn't we conclude that the chimpanzee has the same 'kinds' of emotional experiences that you and I do?

If you're claiming that 'we can't possibly know how it feels to feel in another species', I'm curious to know how you arrived at this conclusion. And how do you then know that you know how it 'feels' to 'feel' like another human being?

I'm not saying I have the answers, one way or the other. I'm saying that we need to make a more objective scientific criteria for claims of attributes of *any* animal, human or otherwise, and a methodology for comparing the attributes of different animals. One way to go about this is with objective measurements, like brain scans and comparative morphology of nervous systems. Comparative behavior is another method.

Plant selflessness and selfish genes

[saforrest]

This is certainly consistent with the selfish-gene explanation for selfless behaviour: there is an evolutionary advantage, from the perspective of the genes, to co-operating with your siblings because your siblings also bear some of your genes.

This is the same reason hy such "nepotism" exists elsewhere in biology; there's no reason why one would expect plants to be any different, though I imagine the problem of recognizing your siblings is somewhat harder.

Re:Cognition and memory

[man_ls]

Since most (all?) plants lack anything resembling a nervous system, and it's widely recognized that higher-order memory and cognitive functions can only occur in the presence of an organized nervous system, it stands to reason that plants aren't capable of memory and cognition.

This isn't to say that plants can't "remember" things, for instance, plant immune response to pathogens, injury, etc. They can habituate to hormones, chemicals, and so forth. It simply means that the "memory" and "learning" being done is low-order physiological homeostasis maintenance and not an insightful act. Intracellular messaging systems account for a lot of "emergent" behavior from these organisms, but it's a far jump from that up to something that can actively plan its actions before it does them.

Re:When will you learn?!

[snowgirl]

I know you're being funny, but you first have to learn to crawl before running. Similarly, you don't advance from Kindergarten to post PhD knowledge in one day.

In a related analogy, you can't go from a sane and reasoning adult to believing this stuff in one day.

Take all the time you need to realize how reality works, because after you die your opinions won't matter much anyways.