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Three reasons fungi are not plants
- dehrmann 6y ago> “Plants grow and live; Animals grow, live and feel.” Even this gets complicated as we learn more. Some plants like Venus fly traps obviously feel. The fresh-cut grass smell is a signal to other plants that the grass is in distress, and people are theorizing trees communicate through roots. Meanwhile, oysters don't have a central nervous system.
- gus_massa 6y agoOysters have a central nervous system, with three ganglia: http://www.manandmollusc.net/advanced_introduction/bivalve_ns.html http://www.manandmollusc.net/advanced_introduction/bivalve_n... If you look carefully, it is very similar to the neural system in any bilateral https://www.britannica.com/science/nervous-system/Diffuse-nervous-systems https://www.britannica.com/science/nervous-system/Diffuse-ne... . It is twisted following the deformation of the body inside the shell. Compare it with https://entomology.unl.edu/charts/nervous.shtml https://entomology.unl.edu/charts/nervous.shtml In our central nervous system one of the ganglia grow tooooooo much. Moreover, the olfactory part of it grow tooooooooooooooooooooooooo much.
- Florin_Andrei 6y agoFreshwater hydra are probably closer to a topology that was never truly centralized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus)#Nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus)#Nervous_system
- ahartmetz 6y agoNow we know(?) why smells are so directly wired to emotions
- quiescant_dodo 6y agoPointing out that plants react to external stimuli is interesting. But using "feel" is an emotionally-loaded word. Additionally, although oysters (and at least dozens of other species of animals) lack a CNS, they also react to external stimuli. In fact, oysters are used in some water systems as sophisticated water quality detectors, e.g. in San Diego https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJJz15N1KEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJJz15N1KEY .
- bch 6y agoDoes our using an oyster as a tool “prove” they have feelings though? We use litmus paper to determine (a certain) quality of water too.
- quiescant_dodo 6y agoAs the sibling commented, there's really no proof to feeling. You can remark that something reacts to the environment. And we can use sophisticated tools to approximate things (e.g. brain MRI can see which parts of the brain "light up" in response to certain things). I don't know of any way to prove feeling. It seems like a solipsistic trap. I _believe_ that most animals "feel", and _believe_ that no plants/fungus do...but it is merely belief that I don't think to be testable.
- agumonkey 6y agoAnd if reaction is a defining factor then all chemical reactions are solid friendships.
- type0 6y agoMaybe so, you can become a friend with psychedelic mushroom if you ingest it :-)
- danielbarla 6y agoI do get the argument, but I do believe it's a pedantic point that's being taken a bit too far. The topic is still worth discussing, without giving up because there's a theoretical point that we cannot prove the causality. We can start out with the assumption that humans can feel, since ourselves experience it, and can relatively safely transfer this to other humans (who exhibit all the subjective external signs of feeling, which seem similar to our own external signs when we are feeling things). We can also isolate the physiological properties which seem to play a role in this; say, a nervous system, or particular brain characteristics or region activations. This can be further evidenced by cases where individuals lack these, and lack the external signs of the feeling. So if you then take a physiologically highly related and similar animal to a human, which also shows the external signs of feeling, I believe the argument that it is NOT feeling would be the option that is more absurd, and requires more proof than the argument that says it is feeling. Of course, this rapidly falls away when we argue about very different types of creatures (say, fungi), or when theorising about types of feeling that might be possible, but we do not have, but nevertheless the entire topic is not worthless, IMHO.
- guerrilla 6y agoMaybe sponges would have been a better example than oysters.
- yters 6y agoHow do we know venus fly traps feel?
- lmkg 6y agoA flytrap closes in response to tactile stimuli. Meaning that it has a sense of touch. The word "feel" is nebulous, but at least one meaning would include that.
- the_af 6y agoIt definitely has a sensor-like mechanism, but is it qualitatively different to some plants growing to face the sun, or a climbing plant climbing up a wall? I've had flytraps and they are fascinating, though I've found them to be very fragile, at least in the conditions I can provide in my balcony. Their traps often turn black and rot after trying to digest a single fly, and I had one Venus flytrap die after flowering (the advice I found online was: don't let it flower, under most less than ideal conditions, the effort of producing the flower will spend the plant's energy reserves and kill it, and the single flower it can produce is not pretty anyway. I should have followed this advice, but curiosity got the better of me).
- Retric 6y agoIt’s more complex than simple sensor, it’s effectively counting numbers of impacts before it responds. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2074582-venus-flytrap-can-count-preys-steps-to-dissolve-them-alive/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2074582-venus-flytrap-c...
- the_af 6y agoYes, the counting part is mentioned in the brief summary at Wikipedia, and I find it fascinating. I wonder if it's some kind of cummulative chemical effect that wears off in a short time, but if it passes a threshold it triggers something.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
- opsy2 6y agoYup, from the article sounds like such thinking has been thrown out for a while. Rather than basing on loosely defined observed traits like if something 'feels', we now have the context of evolution to guide our taxa.
- fatsdomino001 6y agoIncidentally the people theorizing about trees communicating through roots are actually saying trees are communicating via webs of root-connected fungi which act as the connections in between the trees. It's literally underground tunnels of fungi (mycelia) within which the chemical signals are transferred. Colloquially referred to as the Wood Wide Web; technically it's networks of mycorrhizal fungi.
- jbaber 6y agoThis is so completely mainstream that the first I heard of it was a recent The Magic Schoolbus episode.
- rand_r 6y ago> The fresh-cut grass smell is a signal to other plants that the grass is in distress This is really interesting. Signalling to other plants for what purpose? I'd like to read more about it.
- lasfter 6y agoI highly recommend The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Trees signal their neighbours of incoming dangers so they have to time to e.g. pump tannins into their leaves to deter animals that would munch on them.
- Someone 6y agohttps://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717361-200-antelope-activate-the-acacias-alarm-system/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717361-200-antelope... (Not about grass, but an example of plants signaling other plants to take action): “acacias nibbled by antelope produce leaf tannin in quantities lethal to the browsers, and emit ethylene into the air which can travel up to 50 yards. The ethylene warns other trees of the impending danger, which then step up their own production of leaf tannin within just five to ten minutes”
- klmadfejno 6y agoThere's a lot of anthropomorphism in that. Intention to warn, feeling danger, making decisions... They're indicative of an intricate system, but let's not jump the conclusion of inferring it's a sentient system in the lens of our own experience.
- chidg 6y agoYou're right about the language, but the mechanism is real The evolution of gaseous defense hormones in plants is thought to actually benefit the same plant, but has a side effect of 'warning' the plant's neighbours. Because plants don't have a bloodstream, chemical diffusion of messenger molecules throughout a plant is pretty slow. So some plants just use the air around them as a signalling medium, and when they are damaged, release gases into the air which their other leaves can detect. Of course, the gases also affect their neighbours.
- chewbacha 6y agoI think this is a quote from Linneaus and not the thrust of the article. In fact, it’s one of the original arguments for classifying fungi as plants and not closer to animals.
- AareyBaba 6y agoMeanwhile, the sea squirt eats it's brain. "The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.” - Daniel Dennett
- pfdietz 6y agoWhat's fascinating here is that tunicates (like sea squirts) are thought to be the closest relatives to vertebrates, closer even than amphioxus. They just went down a radically different path, perhaps because their chemical defenses against predation are so effective, so they could brutally optimize away things like brains. https://www.nhbs.com/across-the-bridge-book https://www.nhbs.com/across-the-bridge-book
- mr_toad 6y agoRest and vest.
- dfox 6y agoI think that that dichotomy is obviously wrong. More useful dichotomy between animals and "not-animals" involves capability of locomotion, which is something that althought not strictly correct can at least be observed from outside of the system in question.
- samatman 6y agoLet me introduce you to the walking onion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_onion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_onion They grow bulbs where other onions have flowers: these fall over and root, and send up stalks, and it does it all over again. That's locomotion, just, not on the time scale we're accustomed to considering. We also have a whole category for animals which don't practice locomotion, sessile. I would say the most central distinction between animals and (plants|fungi) is that animals have a definite body shape, while the other two have indefinite body shapes. That isn't a perfect distinction (the occasional gecko will regenerate two tails where it had one before), but it's very good, in addition to being striking / obvious.
- theli0nheart 6y ago>> “Plants grow and live; Animals grow, live and feel.” > > Even this gets complicated as we learn more. Some plants like Venus fly traps obviously feel. The fresh-cut grass smell is a signal to other plants that the grass is in distress, and people are theorizing trees communicate through roots. This quote, as noted in the beginning of the article, is attributed to Carl Linnaeus, and subsequently invalidated. As far as I can tell, the author was not attempting to defend this point-of-view, as it's been superseded by modern taxonomic classifications.
- 430scuderia 6y agoAll sentient entities grow, live and feel. Its just that very few have self awareness. The stoned ape theory is the best explanation.
- klmadfejno 6y agoWhen I consider the problem of the Chinese room, I often feel it's a stronger argument that human perception of its own understanding is just illusory, predictable mappings of inputs to outputs. To say we understand things intrinsically and not through a mechanical, artificial process sounds wrong. The ideal AI would be equal to us, and equally flawed from any sort of objective existence. Discussion of plant feelings strikes me as a dumbed down Chinese room. I'd say plants are just stimulus response machines with no option for debate of sentience or awareness. That's not to say they're not intricate, amazing, or beautiful. But "feelings" imply processing of the feelings at some sort of subjective level, and I don't see any reason to believe plants have this.
- nextos 6y agoAll this stuff gets much simpler and much more objective when you look at genomes and build phylogenetic trees. There fungi look like a branch on their own. That's also how archaea were discovered as a separate domain, not just a kingdom.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoNot that much simpler; we end up abandoning a simple tree structure and end up building a web when we have to start including horizontal gene transfer.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoQuite. — a similar problem is also one of historical linguistics where a simple tree structure of “descendants” is often inadequate. I find all of this classification for it's own sake to be a wanting approach that bares little fruit in terms of inference, and mostly seems to exist simply because it comforts the minds of men to classify, even when it can obviously not be done. Even ignoring horizontal gene transfer, the Neanderthal man is typically considered a separate species from the modern human, yet it seems almost inescapable at this point that at least significant populations of the latter have some horizontal ancestry of the former, but some populations also lack it.
- 7357 6y agoReason 1: Fungi Lack Chloroplasts Reason 2: Fungi Have a Unique Mode of Acquiring Nutrients Reason 3: Molecular Evidence Demonstrates Fungi Are More Closely Related to Animals Than to Plants
- uniqueid 6y agoA good follow-up to this article is Joel Spolsky's internet-famous 'Leaky Abstractions' essay. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a... The universe doesn't care what sections of it we consider to be organic or inorganic, one creature or multiple creatures, alive or dead, one species or another, sentient or not. In the end, they're all leaky abstractions.
- firebaze 6y agoI'd not be surprised if we learn in $time_unit that everything in the universe is life. The variable is - like in relativity - the experience of time, not if something is alive (as opposed to moving in relativity). It may be close to zero from our perspective, so quite hard to spot, but we get better measurements with more time.
- pygy_ 6y agoImperfect as they are, these abstractions impact the universe though, through our thoughts and actions, and getting them wrong can have dramatic consequences. Thinking in terms of composable attributes maps the world a lot better than dichotomic, essential taxonomy (composition > inheritance in the CS world). Taxonomy is a premature optimization that comes intuitively because it's been selected by evolution since it was good enough for most purposes.
- npsimons 6y agoI don't recall Spolsky's article (even though the term rings a bell), but as someone having worked in modelling and simulation the better part of my career, I tend to think of it more along the lines of Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong": every "thing" is a model, and no model is perfect, but some models are better than others. If you're waiting for the perfect model, you'll never do anything, which brings to mind another adage, adapted: strong models, weakly held. That is to say, do the best with what you've got and don't be afraid to change once you find a better model, but always remember that they are models with limits. The fine article linked here about fungi I applaud as improving our models.
- tyingq 6y agoI was expecting "don't need sunlight" and "do consume/need oxygen", though I suppose those are offshoots of what was listed.
- simosx 6y agoThere is evidence of fungi appearing over 1 billion years ago [1]. Plants first appeared around 400 million years ago or later [2]. In fact, early plants required symbiosis with fungi to grow. Even now, plants grow better if they have symbiosis with fungi and most plants (such as tomatoes) can grow symbiotically with fungi. But it is cheaper to use fertilizers, and those are used instead. Still, forest ecosystems still depend on fungi and require them as a way to recycle plant material (fallen leaves, dead plants and trees). Evolutionary, fungi existed well before plants managed to evolve. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_fungi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_fungi 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_plants
- kuprel 6y agoThen why do plants branch off sooner than fungi? https://www.onezoom.org/life.html https://www.onezoom.org/life.html
- peanutz454 6y agoThe common ancestor basically tells us who we are related to more, but does not tell you when they branched out. So we are more closely related to fungus than to almonds, and that is what we learn from the tree of life. But the common ancestor of plants was born after the common ancestor of fungus. In Human analogy you could think of it like that cousin uncle (non native speaker, so don't know what if that is the right term) who was born after you, but in the family tree will be shown before you. Edit: Googled a bit. I have a first cousin once removed, who was born after me (referred to as cousin uncle above) Edit2: https://labs.minutelabs.io/Tree-of-Life-Explorer/#/?ids=ott770315&ids=ott731568&ids=ott199764&ids=ott68587 https://labs.minutelabs.io/Tree-of-Life-Explorer/#/?ids=ott7... Minute Earth tree of life explorer makes it easy to see this, but beware many hours can be lost down this rabbit hole.
- mcv 6y agoI thought: "how bad can it be?" but that really is a rabbithole of almost limitless depth. It really drives home just how many species there are that we have no pictures of. And how far you have to zoom in to find anything you can recognize.
- cambalache 6y agoWhy are we promoting a white man's article? BTW this is sarcasm, but judging by the author's corpus of articles this is the kind of question he would love to see raised (Except about him of course)
- tomgp 6y agoI recently finished Merlin Sheldrake's "Entangled Life" which I highly recomend to anyone interested in finding out more about these fascinating organisms. Really changed the way I see the world. My family are getting pretty bored of the fungus facts that I trot out as we go on our daily socially distanced walks through our local woods.
- doublerabbit 6y agoI highly recommend the book: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. [1] He goes in to all studies even down to the point that mushrooms, fungi have their own kind of "internet" that communicate to trees, plants and even to having their own commence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entangled_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entangled_Life
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago> Have you ever picked up something and wondered, 'what is that?' Taxonomists help answer that question by dutifully documenting phenotypic (trait) and genotypic (genetic) differences among living things that allow them to be quickly distinguished and identified. Let us be honest that very often it is simply a matter of arbitrary definitions. A problem of the taxonomy of “reptiles” vs “birds” is that Crocodilians are genetically more related to any bird than they are to any other reptile, but they are still grouped with “reptiles” rather than “birds", for instance. > Placing organisms into categories is useful so that instead of describing a slew of characteristics, we can simply use broad categories as reference points to inform us not only about the nature of an individual, but also about its relationship to other similar organisms. The categories produced by taxonomy produce guidelines at best, not rules, traits that correlate and guidelines that apply when they do, and not when they not do so. I do not believe there is all that much use to it, as nothing can really be concluded from the knowledge that species s belongs to group g. > A new organism classified as a vertebrate, for example, will be commonly understood to have a spine composed of vertebrae. The Hagfish is a famous example of a vertebrate that lost it's spine by evolution. > We have arrived at our first reason fungi are not plants: fungi lack chloroplasts. This verdant, unifying feature of plants Yet there are plants that lack chloroplasts, and animals that have them. https://www.isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechupdate/article/default.asp?ID=12093 https://www.isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechupdate/article/default.a... > Reason 3: Molecular Evidence Demonstrates Fungi Are More Closely Related to Animals Than to Plants Yet, as said, crocodillians are more closely related to birds than to any other reptile, and are still called reptiles. Biological taxonomy is not completely arbitrary and there is some rhyme to it, but much of that rhyme is gut feeling, and the arguments this article raises can easily be shown to not be so absolute as the article would suggest they are. If the article's tone would be to be believed, then the plants that lack chloroplasts, and the vertebrates that lack vertebræ, would no longer be classified as such, and that is clearly not the case. I am not so impressed with mankind's seeming compulsion to classify what won't, and to invent classification schemes that seem rather wanting to classify for it's own sake. This is hardly the biggest problem; the various attempts at classification in psychology have shown to be even more problematic than this.
- jounker 6y ago
- brnt 6y agoThere are so many interesting comments here, is there any podcast covering the natural world in this way? Would love to learn more!
- type0 6y agoMidscape with Sean Caroll has some biology/ philosophical episodes
- grodes 6y agoI don't care whatever definition of plant we've made up. - Grows from the soil - Does not move at my timescale - Looks like a plant It is a plant
- teleforce 6y agoProbably we should have declassified human as animal since we're closer to fungi than to bacteria? [1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11718906/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11718906/ [2]https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/DeepGreen/NYTimes.html https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/DeepGreen/NYTimes.html