6 ms·

Using molecular codes, plants cry for help, ward off bugs (2013)

71 points by brahmwg 10y ago

lancefisher 10y ago
A few months ago, RadioLab had a similar story, but the trees were found to communicate and cooperate across species through a network of underground fungus tubes in what scientists named the wood wide web. http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bitL 10y ago
So, what are we going to eat now as veganism is out of question? :-/
yomly 10y ago
Suppose we discover that plants have a concept for pain. What will vegans do in this case? Eat purely synthetic food?
- newscracker 10y ago
  Not necessarily. Whatever vegans eat today still contributes to cruelty to animals to some extent (like animals used for farming, animals killed in the process of growing and harvesting plants, etc.). Being vegan is about causing significantly lesser harm and doing things that many may consider inconvenient. Even if plants are shown to suffer from pain, if one is inclined to reduce suffering, it still makes sense to eat plants directly than feed them to animals and eat those animals. The conversion inefficiency is of the order of five times or higher - that is, to produce a unit quantity of meat, at least fives times that amount of plants have to be fed to the animals (this is a very general and inaccurate figure - depending on what one compares, this could be very different and be a lot higher too). In general, eating animals still kills significantly more plants than eating plants directly. Of course, if plants are irrefutably shown to suffer pain, then there will be more focus over time in finding alternatives to eating them, like synthetic food. Whatever be the approach, it's impossible for anyone to exist without causing harm to others (intentionally or unintentionally). Doing nothing (possibly claiming hopelessness or futility) is not better than doing something.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    > The conversion inefficiency is of the order of five times or higher - that is, to produce a unit quantity of meat, at least fives times that amount of plants have to be fed to the animals This is the part I never understood about veganism, maybe you can help. As a global apex superpredator, wouldn't you rather reap the rewards of the rest of the ecosystem doing that work for you than doing it yourself? Or do you think there's a way we can produce those 5x plants efficiently enough to feed you without going 2nd hand? Or is the argument that with modern farming we're already producing those pkants anyway, and the meat step is unnecessary? Is it more economical to deal with logistics of 5 units of plants or 1 unit of meat? These are the questions that keep me up at night and I haven't found a satisfactory answer that wasn't mired with propaganda.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - Jill_the_Pill 10y ago
      The argument is that you eat one of those 5 units, and the other 4 are available for the hungry. Feeding livestock rather than people is the problem. That argument isn't airtight -- there are certainly issues of logistics -- but there's no propaganda. A second argument is environmental: farming takes land (deforestation), water and fertilizer, and it pollutes via runoff and ghg emissions, so the less production needed, the better. Also, livestock produce worse runoff and emissions than vegetable or grain farming. "Reaping the rewards of the rest of the ecosystem" isn't sustainable for 7 billion people.
      - eveningcoffee 10y ago
        "Reaping the rewards of the rest of the ecosystem" isn't sustainable for 7 billion people. And whose fault is this, that there are 7 billion people living in the world? I would say that this race to the bottom is not sustainable. What if every family will get sustainable and will not have more than two offspring (on average)?
- psifun 10y ago
  Is there anything in this article that speaks to sensation? If there is, I didn't see it.
- runeks 10y ago
  How would we ever be able to discover if something knows what we call "pain"? I think the more we learn about life, the more we will see that it's a spectrum, and can't really be divided into sentient and non-sentient. I see little difference between a tiny insect fledgling in apparent pain and a leaf releasing a chemical as a response to damage. The mechanical reaction happens because the insect can move and the chemical reaction because the planet cannot. Sentience would appear to be about the ability to move around, which through evolution causes moving life forms to experience pain in response to damage, because it causes them to move away from and avoid the threat. It appears we expect to be able to judge the internal experience of a life form by looking at it. And if it moves, like us, we call it "sentient".
  - yomly 10y ago
    I was indirectly hinting towards this through my posturing. Much of our concepts sentience and intelligence strike me as egotistical and conceited. After all, on the scale of galaxies do our efforts amount to much more than noise? Are we to planets all that different to bacteria on us?
    - yomly 10y ago
      Adding to that - arguably, haven't rats, cockroaches and mosquitoes almost achieved more than us in terms of expansion when we take into account their scale? Or influenza for that matter? I recall a scientific study that suggested the (perceived) passing of time is relative to the size of an organism.[0] So perhaps we can only notice or appreciate phenomena that occur on a timescale that is relative to our size. It's true that with modern techniques we can now study things but our ability to value or appreciate things diminish as the time scale departs from ours... [0]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24078179 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24078179
- amelius 10y ago
  If you look at a time-lapse video of a plant reacting to e.g. a light or shadow, it already looks quite sentient. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHe7y8cy-7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHe7y8cy-7Y
  - justifier 10y ago
    an aside.. your link reminded of one of my favourite adventure time episodes: food chain(o); directed by masaaki yuasa "to a plant, a day is short" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6DlinOXfZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6DlinOXfZg (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Chain_(Adventure_Time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Chain_(Adventure_Time)
- thevardanian 10y ago
  Eating meat is actually (Animal suffering) + (Plant suffering) so taking out animal suffering is still reducing the amount of total suffering. Dharmic religions have argued this for centuries. The conclusion isn't to eliminate suffering from this world, but to reduce it as much as possible. To have as little of an impact on this world as possible, and to live in harmony with the nature as much as possible. Jains for example can take it to an extreme where they even filter out microbiologic organism by wearing a mask, and use a broom to sweep the ground in front of them so that they remove living organism from their path. Admittedly to me that is an outrageous extreme, but it does make a point nonetheless.
  - SubiculumCode 10y ago
    But not eating is even less suffering. that is one hell of a dilemma.
    - thevardanian 10y ago
      That's not the point. But then again people go to great lengths, and twist through mental obstacles just to defend their silly dogmas. It's OK. Willful ignorance is only arrogance, and that never lead to any kind of good result.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
finid 10y ago
In much the same way that humans do. Eventually, we'll come to realize that very little separates humans from other forms of life.
- S_Daedalus 10y ago
  There's a difference between a biological cascade leading to the production of distributed signaling molecules, and "feeling" things, as a few comments seem to be missing. A human being with a practically destroyed brain can still moan and move. There needs to be a feedback mechanism to "feel", and a processing center to have some awareness of that "feeling". There's a long way from complex animal life that we consider to be simple only by comparison with ourselves, and a stand of Eucalyptus.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
This was being written about in the '80s. Anyway, I'm thinking farmers could run through fields abrading the leaves, to get the plants to make their own insecticide. Could be cheaper/more effective.
bitL 10y ago
A bit off-topic, just an idea I got while reading the replies and thinking about our place in the Universe, food hierarchy and available time - isn't evolution as we currently understand it computationally too expensive? When we look at local adaptations, it seems to be indeed a fact we can observe; generations of life adjusting their "software" wrt environment, and I can imagine this happening in polynomial time. Now making a big jump from e.g. fish to a bird seems to me impossible in polynomial time (even in billion years); here I would think about evolution only as a hypothesis, not a fact. Is anybody tackling this (IMO computational) problem?
- zyxley 10y ago
  > isn't evolution as we currently understand it computationally too expensive? What? This question doesn't even really make sense to me in the first place. Natural selection isn't a computational process. It's the consistent but basically coincidental result of constant subtle mutations and genetic inheritance. > Now making a big jump from e.g. fish to a bird seems to me impossible in polynomial time (even in billion years) It obviously isn't impossible, since it happened. If you believe otherwise, your perceptions and/or assumptions are wrong.
  - bitL 10y ago
    Yeah, but those mutations/inheritance are happening on similarly structured DNAs (i.e. the same number of chromosomes) using some algorithmic way (well, it's a process running in time, hence it's an algorithm and therefore complexity analysis applies), and on pre-baked blocks within DNA that get "randomly" de/activated. Now being well-versed in computational complexity and humanoid robotics, it just doesn't seem to me plausible that a similar "simple" process can help us create totally new types of robots. Analogy would be - changing their SW should produce completely different types of robots where HW change is actually needed, like new types of sensors, leg architecture etc. Just general self-modifying SW for robots is NP-hard (meaning forget about it), now imagine you can also let it develop new HW for itself. We already know many processes in quantum chemistry that are at least NP-hard and some likely outside BQP. Hence the time of Universe might not be sufficient even given we assume Universe runs these processes on quantum computers. That fish->bird happened doesn't mean the evolution theory as formulated nowadays can be applied here due to complexity argument. Maybe extended version of it is in the works? Or another, better theory? That's what I am basically asking. Current evolution theory seems to be nicely describing local changes (i.e. which organisms survive stressful changes in environment) but it doesn't explain whole new set of functionalities coming out of nowhere; evolution there is basically just "faith" and assumed generalization of this local adaptation we can study without much empiric observations.
truth_sentinell 10y ago
The whole idea of veganism is doing the less harm to our world as possible. That's what most people do not understand. It is the best rational decision. When you go through all the fallacies meat-eaters throw at you, the only reason with "weight" is the taste. With our current technology, enhanced food and other stuff, meat eating is just a luxury in most developed countries. You don't need it (unless you have a specific illness), but you eat it because it gives you 5 minutes of pleasure in your mouth. In 2016, meat is the new diamond.

71 points by brahmwg 10y ago

A few months ago, RadioLab had a similar story, but the trees were found to communicate and cooperate across species through a network of underground fungus tubes in what scientists named the wood wide web. http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

bitL 10y ago

So, what are we going to eat now as veganism is out of question? :-/

yomly 10y ago

Suppose we discover that plants have a concept for pain. What will vegans do in this case? Eat purely synthetic food?

newscracker 10y ago
Not necessarily. Whatever vegans eat today still contributes to cruelty to animals to some extent (like animals used for farming, animals killed in the process of growing and harvesting plants, etc.). Being vegan is about causing significantly lesser harm and doing things that many may consider inconvenient. Even if plants are shown to suffer from pain, if one is inclined to reduce suffering, it still makes sense to eat plants directly than feed them to animals and eat those animals. The conversion inefficiency is of the order of five times or higher - that is, to produce a unit quantity of meat, at least fives times that amount of plants have to be fed to the animals (this is a very general and inaccurate figure - depending on what one compares, this could be very different and be a lot higher too). In general, eating animals still kills significantly more plants than eating plants directly. Of course, if plants are irrefutably shown to suffer pain, then there will be more focus over time in finding alternatives to eating them, like synthetic food. Whatever be the approach, it's impossible for anyone to exist without causing harm to others (intentionally or unintentionally). Doing nothing (possibly claiming hopelessness or futility) is not better than doing something.
- Swizec 10y ago
  > The conversion inefficiency is of the order of five times or higher - that is, to produce a unit quantity of meat, at least fives times that amount of plants have to be fed to the animals This is the part I never understood about veganism, maybe you can help. As a global apex superpredator, wouldn't you rather reap the rewards of the rest of the ecosystem doing that work for you than doing it yourself? Or do you think there's a way we can produce those 5x plants efficiently enough to feed you without going 2nd hand? Or is the argument that with modern farming we're already producing those pkants anyway, and the meat step is unnecessary? Is it more economical to deal with logistics of 5 units of plants or 1 unit of meat? These are the questions that keep me up at night and I haven't found a satisfactory answer that wasn't mired with propaganda.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - Jill_the_Pill 10y ago
    The argument is that you eat one of those 5 units, and the other 4 are available for the hungry. Feeding livestock rather than people is the problem. That argument isn't airtight -- there are certainly issues of logistics -- but there's no propaganda. A second argument is environmental: farming takes land (deforestation), water and fertilizer, and it pollutes via runoff and ghg emissions, so the less production needed, the better. Also, livestock produce worse runoff and emissions than vegetable or grain farming. "Reaping the rewards of the rest of the ecosystem" isn't sustainable for 7 billion people.
    - eveningcoffee 10y ago
      "Reaping the rewards of the rest of the ecosystem" isn't sustainable for 7 billion people. And whose fault is this, that there are 7 billion people living in the world? I would say that this race to the bottom is not sustainable. What if every family will get sustainable and will not have more than two offspring (on average)?
psifun 10y ago
Is there anything in this article that speaks to sensation? If there is, I didn't see it.
runeks 10y ago
How would we ever be able to discover if something knows what we call "pain"? I think the more we learn about life, the more we will see that it's a spectrum, and can't really be divided into sentient and non-sentient. I see little difference between a tiny insect fledgling in apparent pain and a leaf releasing a chemical as a response to damage. The mechanical reaction happens because the insect can move and the chemical reaction because the planet cannot. Sentience would appear to be about the ability to move around, which through evolution causes moving life forms to experience pain in response to damage, because it causes them to move away from and avoid the threat. It appears we expect to be able to judge the internal experience of a life form by looking at it. And if it moves, like us, we call it "sentient".
- yomly 10y ago
  I was indirectly hinting towards this through my posturing. Much of our concepts sentience and intelligence strike me as egotistical and conceited. After all, on the scale of galaxies do our efforts amount to much more than noise? Are we to planets all that different to bacteria on us?
  - yomly 10y ago
    Adding to that - arguably, haven't rats, cockroaches and mosquitoes almost achieved more than us in terms of expansion when we take into account their scale? Or influenza for that matter? I recall a scientific study that suggested the (perceived) passing of time is relative to the size of an organism.[0] So perhaps we can only notice or appreciate phenomena that occur on a timescale that is relative to our size. It's true that with modern techniques we can now study things but our ability to value or appreciate things diminish as the time scale departs from ours... [0]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24078179 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24078179
amelius 10y ago
If you look at a time-lapse video of a plant reacting to e.g. a light or shadow, it already looks quite sentient. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHe7y8cy-7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHe7y8cy-7Y
- justifier 10y ago
  an aside.. your link reminded of one of my favourite adventure time episodes: food chain(o); directed by masaaki yuasa "to a plant, a day is short" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6DlinOXfZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6DlinOXfZg (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Chain_(Adventure_Time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Chain_(Adventure_Time)
thevardanian 10y ago
Eating meat is actually (Animal suffering) + (Plant suffering) so taking out animal suffering is still reducing the amount of total suffering. Dharmic religions have argued this for centuries. The conclusion isn't to eliminate suffering from this world, but to reduce it as much as possible. To have as little of an impact on this world as possible, and to live in harmony with the nature as much as possible. Jains for example can take it to an extreme where they even filter out microbiologic organism by wearing a mask, and use a broom to sweep the ground in front of them so that they remove living organism from their path. Admittedly to me that is an outrageous extreme, but it does make a point nonetheless.
- SubiculumCode 10y ago
  But not eating is even less suffering. that is one hell of a dilemma.
  - thevardanian 10y ago
    That's not the point. But then again people go to great lengths, and twist through mental obstacles just to defend their silly dogmas. It's OK. Willful ignorance is only arrogance, and that never lead to any kind of good result.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

finid 10y ago

In much the same way that humans do. Eventually, we'll come to realize that very little separates humans from other forms of life.

S_Daedalus 10y ago
There's a difference between a biological cascade leading to the production of distributed signaling molecules, and "feeling" things, as a few comments seem to be missing. A human being with a practically destroyed brain can still moan and move. There needs to be a feedback mechanism to "feel", and a processing center to have some awareness of that "feeling". There's a long way from complex animal life that we consider to be simple only by comparison with ourselves, and a stand of Eucalyptus.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

This was being written about in the '80s. Anyway, I'm thinking farmers could run through fields abrading the leaves, to get the plants to make their own insecticide. Could be cheaper/more effective.

bitL 10y ago

A bit off-topic, just an idea I got while reading the replies and thinking about our place in the Universe, food hierarchy and available time - isn't evolution as we currently understand it computationally too expensive? When we look at local adaptations, it seems to be indeed a fact we can observe; generations of life adjusting their "software" wrt environment, and I can imagine this happening in polynomial time. Now making a big jump from e.g. fish to a bird seems to me impossible in polynomial time (even in billion years); here I would think about evolution only as a hypothesis, not a fact. Is anybody tackling this (IMO computational) problem?

zyxley 10y ago
> isn't evolution as we currently understand it computationally too expensive? What? This question doesn't even really make sense to me in the first place. Natural selection isn't a computational process. It's the consistent but basically coincidental result of constant subtle mutations and genetic inheritance. > Now making a big jump from e.g. fish to a bird seems to me impossible in polynomial time (even in billion years) It obviously isn't impossible, since it happened. If you believe otherwise, your perceptions and/or assumptions are wrong.
- bitL 10y ago
  Yeah, but those mutations/inheritance are happening on similarly structured DNAs (i.e. the same number of chromosomes) using some algorithmic way (well, it's a process running in time, hence it's an algorithm and therefore complexity analysis applies), and on pre-baked blocks within DNA that get "randomly" de/activated. Now being well-versed in computational complexity and humanoid robotics, it just doesn't seem to me plausible that a similar "simple" process can help us create totally new types of robots. Analogy would be - changing their SW should produce completely different types of robots where HW change is actually needed, like new types of sensors, leg architecture etc. Just general self-modifying SW for robots is NP-hard (meaning forget about it), now imagine you can also let it develop new HW for itself. We already know many processes in quantum chemistry that are at least NP-hard and some likely outside BQP. Hence the time of Universe might not be sufficient even given we assume Universe runs these processes on quantum computers. That fish->bird happened doesn't mean the evolution theory as formulated nowadays can be applied here due to complexity argument. Maybe extended version of it is in the works? Or another, better theory? That's what I am basically asking. Current evolution theory seems to be nicely describing local changes (i.e. which organisms survive stressful changes in environment) but it doesn't explain whole new set of functionalities coming out of nowhere; evolution there is basically just "faith" and assumed generalization of this local adaptation we can study without much empiric observations.

truth_sentinell 10y ago

The whole idea of veganism is doing the less harm to our world as possible. That's what most people do not understand. It is the best rational decision. When you go through all the fallacies meat-eaters throw at you, the only reason with "weight" is the taste. With our current technology, enhanced food and other stuff, meat eating is just a luxury in most developed countries. You don't need it (unless you have a specific illness), but you eat it because it gives you 5 minutes of pleasure in your mouth. In 2016, meat is the new diamond.