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Once Considered Outlandish, the Idea That Plants Help Their Relatives is Taking Root (sciencemag.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A Canadian biologist planted the seed of the idea more than a decade ago, but many plant biologists regarded it as heretical -- plants lack the nervous systems that enable animals to recognize kin, so how can they know their relatives? But with a series of recent findings, the notion that plants really do care for their most genetically close peers -- in a quiet, plant-y way -- is taking root.
. Some species constrain how far their roots spread, others change how many flowers they produce, and a few tilt or shift their leaves to minimize shading of neighboring plants, favoring related individuals.
"We need to recognize that plants not only sense whether it's light or dark or if they've been touched, but also whom they are interacting with," says Susan Dudley, a plant evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, whose early plant kin recognition studies sparked the interest of many scientists. Beyond broadening views of plant behavior, the new work may have a practical side. In September 2018, a team in China reported that rice planted with kin grows better, a finding that suggested family ties can be exploited to improve crop yields. "It seems anytime anyone looks for it, they find a kin effect," says Andre Kessler, a chemical ecologist at Cornell University.
"We need to recognize that plants not only sense whether it's light or dark or if they've been touched, but also whom they are interacting with," says Susan Dudley, a plant evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, whose early plant kin recognition studies sparked the interest of many scientists. Beyond broadening views of plant behavior, the new work may have a practical side. In September 2018, a team in China reported that rice planted with kin grows better, a finding that suggested family ties can be exploited to improve crop yields. "It seems anytime anyone looks for it, they find a kin effect," says Andre Kessler, a chemical ecologist at Cornell University.
Where you at dawg
I wonder if we did similar studies with human ethnic populations what we might find.
root root
The irony of mainstream Science is that it's frequently wrong.
I've heard something eerie similar on TED quite a lot time ago: Suzanne Simard: How trees talk to each other | TED Talk, and Greg Gage: Electrical experiments with plants that count and communicate | TED Talk. There are many other TED talks about the topic of plants' nervous system, intelligence and communication. This kinda invalidates the whole premise of vegetarianism but I don't want to argue about that now.
Would that leave scavenging are the only humane method for the acquisition of nutrients?
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Astrophysics has become a religion that ignores failed predictions in favor of ad hoc handwaving.
Gold standard studies in many fields cannot be replicated.
Nobody knows WTF people should be eating. ...
I noticed long ago that clinging vines, like morning glory, reach out to fences or other items they can wind their way onto. How do they reach out in the right direction?
Run amok.
How and why do you think grasses evolved?
CAPITALISM
I would suggest that unless there is some specific mechanism for distinguishing genetically similar roots versus genetically the same roots (ie the roots of the same plant) then it is likely just the same mechanism that plants use for organizing their own structure. After all roots need to be able to spread out and not grow back into themselves, so this is just the result of that same simple mechanism of being able to grow without self harm.
But we managed to get some magazine to publish it, and that’s all that matters.
#DeleteChrome
Roots grow towards water. Flowers face the sun. Tensile leaves shunt water when touched.
These aren't conscious efforts. Sentience is a form of specialized nerve awareness, meant to allow your immediate-response MUSCULATURE (a calorie/nutritionally expensive feature we pay to enable mobility) to react to environmental conditions second-by-second.
Plants lacking motion have no use for super-precise environmental awareness. Their adaptations aren't conscious. Even slow, chemical hormones are more communication than tissue-based mechanisms. Plants are "aware" of trauma, but have no use for pain. Even your body dials back the notices when a bruise is quietly being treated, only speaking up if you disturb it.
Alturism is an evolutionary mandate, not a Hollywood feelgood. Exceptions don't overturn this fact of biology. Altruistic tissue properties are even less worthy of sensationalism. This isn't a wholesome facebook post, it's good optimization of a species.
Genetics will shape an animal brain so it knows sacrificing uncles for nephews is good strategy. The "news" here is that it will do it to tissues too. "Awareness of other [same species] plants" being too trivial a mechanism to mention.
It was a genuine bit of science. Drummed up to clickbait 11.
And then libtards are surprised when no one beleves there bullshit about global warming and evolution.
Meat, a lot of saturated (animal) fat, maybe some organs (like liver), and an occasional selection of fruits and veggies but only when they would be naturally in season (i.e., Summer).
For most of human history, there weren't a lot of fruit or vegetables. Just meat and FAT.
Chronic consumption of carbohydrates (in any form) is wrongheaded.
Oh. And, rocket science is easy.
Can recognize each other, why not vegetables? After all they are more intelligent.
And besides that Mr. tree 'wants' you to eat that apple and deposit the seeds somewhere else in your manure. I personally eat meat because in my view everything eats every other damned thing in this cruel old world. But I think vegans remain morally safe eating plants. Janes, an Indian sect, are known to wait under trees until fruit falls. You are welcome.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Please don't feed the plants blood. It may result in Audrey IV...
A fruit is basically just a green or red/orange/yellow fetus that you can pluck and peel with a pairing knife.
You think the plants don't care because they don't reflexively cover their nads whenever anyone shows up with a baseball and a baseball bat? That they exist in pure vegetative bliss, like a steer happily chewing his cud, wondering what all the fuss is about?
You need to think a little bit harder about vegetative value systems. Try to work your way past the death fixation of Judeo-Christian ethics. Mostly we didn't kill slaves, either. And if they're happily alive, what's the problem?
Also, prairie agriculture makes extensive use of power equipment, and has for some time now (it's on the internet, you can look it up).
That's the daily breakfast prayer of the little-known prairie Ent, Skullgluten.
Mainstream medicine says that glucose is the main fuel for the brain, while ketones are a backup fuel; however, humans only started eating lots of sugar with the beginning of agriculture, and the grains that are grown today are much richer in sugars than the grains that were grown even just centuries ago.
It's NOT the case that glucose is the main fuel for the body/brain; rather, ketones are the main fuel, with sugar being useful only for acute consumption or for building up fat for the winter ahead.
See subject: Specifically that when another plant (usually a parent or seed child of said parent whose roots are in contact w/ each other) is sick or being beseiged, the plant relative will send chemical 'cures' thru the soil to its relative (takes a lot of time iirc).
* Miraculous really...
APK
P.S.=> I also had a HUGE argument w/ my philosophy class (logic CS majors have to take in truth tables etc.) that IN A WAY? Plants are more ADVANCED than we are - how so?? Well, we scurry around to make our lives - all plants have to do is soak up nutrients from the soil & cook sugar in their leaves for fuel soaking themselves in the sunlight to do so - that said?? Who is doing it more efficiently, US or plants??? Some "Food 4 Thought" that I think... apk
Meat and fat, with a wee bit of sugar now and then as a treat.
Not rocket science.
... that at the very least, many plants attack their foes. Many plants produce chemicals in their roots or leaf litter that hinder plant growth or seed germination but which they themselves are immune to. And when I say "long known", observations of such allelopathathic effects date back to at least Theophrastus in 300 BC, and most agricultural societies have long had rules about how "Plant A will grow well with B but poorly with C", which can generally be seen as allelopathy. In research, most cases of concern are where weeds produce chemicals that hinder commercial crops, but it also works the other way around - for example, rice (which they mention above) creates root exudates hinder the germination of competing seedlings.
Of course, there are non-chemical ways (such as shade, root growth, etc) to hinder foes without hurting yourself or your brethren, but the chemical ways are usually the most striking, as their purposes are so unambiguous. While shade, root growth, etc can be natural consequences of your own development, you don't invest energy in producing secondary metabolites unless you want them to accomplish something with them.
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
If you've got excess body fat, then why TF isn't your body consuming that readily available food instead of knocking you sideways with cravings for carbohydrates? It's because your chronic consumption of carbohydrates (even in "good" forms) has trapped your body into chemical dependence on sugars, thus making access to your own fat more expensive than it should be.
If you've got fat and still suffer frequent pangs of hunger, then your body is in BAD shape. You should almost never be hungry; one, perhaps sizable, meal each day should be enough. Fat in your diet keeps your blood sugar stable; sugars in your diet spike and drop them, and lead to pathological insulin processes.
Animal parks have long known that trees who get nibbled at by giraffes and other wild animals go hungry, because the trees alarm their relatives and all of them begin to send bitter poisons into their leaves, making them inedible. If they can't leave the park they die.
Maybe there is that problem if your source of meat is raised on antibiotics and industrially produced grain, which is not even their natural diet, and then are butchered and processed with endless chemicals.
Do you people who push plant-based diets also avoid pesticides and post-processing? Of course you do; you've just got one thing wrong: Your body needs to consume FAT, not carbohydrates, and you need to cook plants in special ways in order to avoid the myriad natural poisons and irritants that they produce (to say nothing of the sugar).
always remember:
white men are the only beings capable of loving their children.
white people are the only beings capable of loving their children.
men are the only beings capable of loving their children.
humans are the only beings capable of loving their children.
no, wait, scratch that. only white arian humans.
ok, it really needs to be all humans again.
mammals are the only beings capable of loving their children (or feeling pain, for that matter).
warm-blooded...
vertebrates...
animals...
now plants.
Are plants really the big surprise? There are more leaves on Earth than there are stars in the galaxy. Trees out-live basically every other form of life that we recognize. Also, the biggest by far. They grow in vast populations that we call forests. They literally house a gargantuan proportion of the lives on this planet -- including us, by the way. They can be said to be the most successful beings to ever live.
Nah, they don't care for their children. I mean, that would be crazy!
Next up: planets support their moons, stars support their planets, and galaxies support their stars.
10'000 AD: okay, look, it would seem that any population or system that's survived for millions of years, takes care of its own. I think it's time for us to stop being surprised by it, and just start assuming that things don't survive by accident.
Imagine what all those cloned Cannabis plants are saying to each other? Probably something about where the hell are all the men?
If this research means that plants have a degree of sentience, will killing plants be seen as exploitive?
There is commentary elsewhere in this thread that vegans could still eat fruit and nuts, because these are 'given' by plants as a reproductive attractant, not requiring death of the plant.
However, I see a big BUT coming. The difference between vegans and vegetarians is that vegetarians eat products nonlethally derived from animals, such as honey and dairy. Vegans consider these products to be 'exploiting' animals, so they are off the plate. The most advanced and morally pure vegan logicians are going to argue, how is an apple different from the milk of a cow? Because Nature intends that apples be eaten by animals that will derive nutrition from the apple while spreading its seeds, humans would be depriving the apple tree's ally species of this natural nutrient. Furthermore, very few apples consumed by humans result in natural apple propagation.
Most plants also (quite literally) feed the soil microbiome by producing sugars and other nutrients that bacteria and fungi absorb. The microorganisms return the favor by fixing nitrogen, for plants that don't do that themselves, as well as defending the roots from non-friendly microorganisms, and probably a whole host of other things that we don't even know about yet: perhaps even participating in the communication network that plants use to help identify clones vs. same-species neighbors vs. other plants.
If interested, check out Symphony of the Soil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
this type of wording is really much of the problem. It anthropomorphizes plants. Sense ... is something associated with nervous systems. Plants react to hormones as part of a complex system. They 'sense' things even less then computers do.
Whatever behavior, with forethought or not, with nervous system or not, with mobility and motor functions or not, that helped one set of alleles to survive better than others out competed the others.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yet more proof that plants, are living, breathing, thinking, feeling creatures!
And yet we devour billions of them every day. Worse yet, they are often still alive when they are eaten!
Unconscionable!
At least meat-eaters kill their food first.
Stop the madness! Join PETP (pet-pee) today!
Killing an animal and eating it alive is not "acceptable to vegetarians." They don't do it.
Maybe you meant they are ok with the fact that animals do this to other animals. And that is somehow contradictory with their decision not to do it themselves?
You are just trying to find hypocrisy where it isn't. Wolves eat animals because they must, and because they are wolves. Humans are omnivores, and as such they have the option of subsisting entirely (or primarily) on plants. And it is, in fact, supremely healthy to do so (just ask the Shao-Lin monks, the most powerful athletes in the world, who are strict vegans from childhood).
So, vegetarians choose to hold themselves to a standard that is appropriate for them, and different to one that might apply to wild animals.
I saw a lady introduce isotope marked nutrient into a mother oak tree. She then found that isotope marked nutrient in the young oak offspring but not other polnts so much. She asserted that fungi had served as the transmission vehicle for those nutrients.
People for the ethical treatment of plants
Vegans finally get a taste of their own disdain.
Your body becomes unable to process fat, and instead begs you to eat sugar. That's why obese people can't lose weight and yet are always famished.
Fat is literally readily available fuel, packaged for quick consumption by the body. Obese people are walking around with an enormous amount of energy strapped around and between their organs.
Find your dad's paper, and cite it on Wikipedia in the History section for ulcers.