Do Plants Think?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-plants-think-daniel-chamovitz

by rosser • 14 years ago

68 51 14 years ago

greenyoda2• 14 years ago

It's an interesting article, but the title is a bit misleading. The article is mostly about how plants react to various sensory stimuli.

olalonde• 14 years ago

"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

jlarocco• 14 years ago

Don't take this personally, but can people please stop mentioning "Betteridge's Law"?

Somebody mentions it every single time a headline ends in a question mark, and it's not witty, clever, or funny any more. It's just annoying at this point. That style of headline isn't going away, and at this point everybody knows about "Betteridge's Law".

rosser2• 14 years ago

Admittedly, "think" is perhaps an inapt word choice, but how is response to stimuli not, in some fashion, awareness?

derleth5• 14 years ago

> Admittedly, "think" is perhaps an inapt word choice, but how is response to stimuli not, in some fashion, awareness?

Sure, it can be, if you're willing to admit that computers respond to stimuli.

greenyoda2• 14 years ago

Think of the "knee-jerk" reflex you get when the doctor hits you on the knee. It's a response to a stimulus, but it happens without even any involvement from your brain: it's just a round trip to the spinal cord.[1] I don't think that's what we usually think of as "awareness", which happens at the cognitive level. Reflexes like eye-blinking are even operational when you're unconscious.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patellar_reflex

saraid216• 14 years ago

Right. Questions like this are stupid because they're not asking a usable question. The best response to the headline is really, "Define a thought." This is difficult in humans, never mind anything else.

If you choose to define thoughts as stimuli-response, then you're classifying our entire system of instinctive responses as thoughts, which is practically a brain bypass. (The literal knee-jerk reaction.)

Falling3• 14 years ago

As a vegetarian, I constantly have to suffer through idiotic arguments based on headlines like this. I know this happens in all areas of life, but this is definitely the one to which I am exposed most often and it drives me absolutely nuts.

Journalists, please stop giving people ammo for their stupid guns.

whichdan2• 14 years ago

Strangely, I've never had anyone argue this to me, but I do get asked, several times per year, if I eat seafood.

aristus• 14 years ago

In many languages, "meat" roughly equates to "red meat". Fish and fowl are considered different categories. I believe this came about because of a Catholic church ruling that fish did not count against the promise to give up meat during Lent. It also lead to silliness like classing the chigüire / capybara, basically a large swamp-dwelling gerbil, as a fish.

jaylevitt• 14 years ago

My usual answer: "Only Broccoli Fish."

When they ask what a Broccoli Fish is, I explain patiently that there's no such thing.

derleth5• 14 years ago

> if I eat seafood

Do you kill invasive insects? Frankly, a shrimp or a lobster is pretty much on a level with a cockroach, when you get down to neural complexity and everything relevant to moral vegetarianism, as opposed to vegetarianism for health reasons.

Bony fish are not much more complex.

Things like sea cucumber don't even have brains: They have nerves, but they lack any centralized structure for them to converge on. Same with jellyfish.

So I suppose my point is that it isn't a dumb question, at least if you're a vegetarian for moral reasons related to killing a living being with emotions.

whatusername• 14 years ago

How about Oysters? http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2010/04/consider_the...

polyfractal• 14 years ago

For the record, I agree with you.

BUT, as a biologist, I often find it amusing that people discount plants completely. It's easy to forget that they are alive too. Fundamentally, they aren't so different from you or a turtle or a fruit fly. Different cellular structure, sure. Not easily recognizable "consciousness", absolutely. Non-motile, check.

However, plants are very much alive. They react to stimuli, survive in hostile environments, procreate. They are more alien to our sensibilities, but they are arguably not very much different in the grand scale of things.

a_bonobo2• 14 years ago

As another biologist, I like to troll vegetarians by insisting that plants have pain, because what else do you call a signalling system which starts a damage-response-system?

wisty• 14 years ago

Downvoted. It's a semi-serious article, not something that suggests you shouldn't eat plants (what else can you eat? meat? cows eat lots of plants when they are being raised).

Only a really disingenuous person would claim it's kinder to eat meat. There's arguments in favor of eating meat (there's some book called "The Mindful Carnivore" which goes a bit deeper than "meat bad veg good"), but ... that's way off topic.

Nobody with half a brain thinks plants scream when you eat them, and that's not what the article is saying.

rosser2• 14 years ago

There actually is a religion/practice that eschews even eating whole or root vegetables on the basis that killing plants is also murder. It's called Jainism, and practitioners eat only fruits, leaves, nuts, seeds, and the like. They also walk barefoot, and sweep the ground in front of themselves as they go to avoid inadvertently stepping on insects.

wtvanhest• 14 years ago

I dated a vegetarian for a while and people would always ask her dumb questions about it and make unoriginal (basically exact same) jokes about it so I sympathize with you to a degree.

On the other hand, I find it annoying that a vegetarian can draw the line in the sand and decide what is morally correct for everyone to believe.

I'm sure there are vegans judging you for eating (milk, eggs etc. whatever you do eat), and there are "vegetarians" that eat seafood who think you are too extreme, and there are probably people who only eat plants that died of natural causes who think all those groups are terrible and should have more self control over their diet.

The article was pretty interesting and novel to me and if you get a few more dumb questions from people, I don't think it is the end of the world.

derleth5• 14 years ago

> people who only eat plants that died of natural causes

Not that I've heard of. I have heard of fruititarians, who only eat the parts of plants the plants produce specifically to be eaten. (It's more complex than that, in fact, but I won't go into it all here.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism

vacri• 14 years ago

I find it annoying that a vegetarian can draw the line in the sand and decide what is morally correct for everyone to believe.

Only some vegetarians do that, and it's wrong to imply that it's a defining feature of the demographic. I have vegetarian friends that cook me meat when I visit for dinner, despite me asking not to get special treatment. Other vegetarians just don't like the taste of meat, nothing to do with moral or health attitudes.

Unless the vegetarian is being vocal about the moral issue, it's pretty impolite to bring up the topic apropos of nothing - it's almost always just the questioner trying to score some sort of point.

jamesbritt2• 14 years ago

On the other hand, I find it annoying that a vegetarian can draw the line in the sand and decide what is morally correct for everyone to believe.

Pretty much everyone does that. People don't notice so much when other people are drawing the same lines as them.

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

As a meat-eater, I've determined that the answer to the question isn't particularly relevant to my dietary choices.

lostlogin3• 14 years ago

What about the intensive questioning on how you get protein. I do t think I've every asked anyone anything like this. Is there anything more boring?

tathagatadg• 14 years ago

I particularly enjoyed the memory part - where they mention a venus fly trap remembers the contact with one leg of the insect then confirms that another leg has touched, and then the trap closes. Then 15-20 mins later it'd open again. This eliminates false positives, conserves energy!

while(1): if (get_count_contact()!=2) continue; else close_trap(); sleep(15); set_count_contact(0);

If nature wrote this kinda code, Evolution is like debugging! But this is really really oversimplified ...

pygy_• 14 years ago

One of the most amazing feat of plants regarding information processing is the way the leaves optimize the gas exchange process. They do this by opening and closing small gates known as stomata [0].

Each stoma integrate their local state with the current atmospheric conditions and the state of their neighbors, behaving as the cells of a cellular automaton [1].

Plant leaves literally compute.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoma

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/101/4/918.full

maeon3• 14 years ago

If Aliens visit us, they will likely classify us as "Non thinking creatures", just as we classify plants as non thinking. Everything rests on a spectrum and trying to classify everything into bins as "thinking" or "non thinking" is a childish way to go about explaining how the world works.

If you generate a 200 hz signal around the root systems of cabbage, the roots will grow toward the source. The plants can generate that signal as well, so yes, certain plants communicate with a very rudimentary audio communication system.

Do plants think? It depends on your definition, but yes, Plants think, computers think, humans think. A better word might be "plants calculate the best course of action to achieve a goal just like humans do.".

derleth5• 14 years ago

> If Aliens visit us, they will likely classify us as "Non thinking creatures"

No. Obviously not. We obviously manipulate our environment in complex ways.

> "plants calculate the best course of action to achieve a goal just like humans do.".

If you truly believed this you could never justify eating them.

fallous• 14 years ago

I think (no pun intended) that plants and some other species that lack central brains operate more like BEAM robots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics in that the behaviors they exhibit can be remarkably similar to intentional behavior.

If you believe that a Turing test is sufficient to judge an AI as "intelligent" then in the same way you'd have to conclude that the behavior is the measure, which seems to disallow certain assumptions regarding intent.

Then again, given the recent research into how the gut flora can affect all manner of processes in humans, it certainly looks like Me(tm) is a product of a whole host of complex systems whose interactions display an emergent "intentional" system.

Do Plants Think?

Related Stories