Plants have intelligence and feelings. That means you mustn't eat them.
SALAD IS MURDER!
You must follow ypur principles and begin starving yourself immediately.
Dreams have been described as dress rehearsals for real life, opportunities to gratify wishes, and a form of nocturnal therapy. A new theory aims to make sense of it all.
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In 1900 the Bengali biophysicist and botanist Jagdish Chandra Bose taught that plants are not merely passive organisms lacking sense. Instead, they explore their environments and can learn and change their behavior with purpose. Plants have an electrical nervous system, he claimed, that allows them to transmit information among their roots, stems, leaves, and other parts.
In the last couple of decades botany has begun to catch up with Bose’s ideas, leading scientists to some amazing questions: Are plants conscious? Do they have knowledge? Can they feel pain?
In 1992 researchers discovered that tomato plants will produce certain proteins throughout their bodies when they’re wounded. The speed of the response precludes the possibility of chemical signals; the plants are producing electrical signals to direct change to occur more quickly within more distant parts of the plant.
Slow yet Smart
We tend to look at plants as dumb and nearly inert. They’re anchored in place and seem to bend passively with the breeze and grow gradually to capture sunlight. With rare exceptions such as the Venus flytrap, they move only very slowly, such as when a vine seeks an object to attach to. With time-lapse photography, scientists have begun to capture plant movements that seem sensible and intelligent. Under time-lapse, the seedling of a Cuscuta (dodder) vine seems to search for a host by sniffing the air. It then lunges toward its new host when it finds one, resembling snake movements.
When plants seem to be behaving like animals, we must reconsider whether intelligence truly is an exclusively animal trait. Watch a Dodder vine sniff out its prey: http://video.pbs.org/viralplayer/2341198769
Scientists are indeed questioning whether this distinction is as clear-cut as modern science has previously assumed. In 2005 researchers founded the Society for Plant Neurobiology to advance this debate. A founder of the organization, the Italian scientist Stefano Mancuso, argues that we should stop assuming that a brain is needed for intelligence. Even without neurons and a brain, plants can acquire, process, and integrate information to shape their behavior in a way that could be called intelligent.
Locating Intelligence
As reported in a recent article in the magazine New Scientist,2 the apparent magic of consciousness in plants seems to depend on several physiological features, particularly those of their root systems. Plant roots include various “zones,” including a “transition zone,” which is electrically active and seems analogous to the animal brain—it contains a mechanism similar to neurotransmitters. Another part of the root, the root cap, can sense various physical properties “such as gravity, humidity, light, oxygen, and nutrients.”3 Most cells in plants can make and transmit neuron-like activity. In roots every cell can do so.
Mancuso says, “If we need to find an integrative processing part of the plant, we need to look at the roots.”4
Plants also produce serotonin, GABA, and melatonin, which act as hormones and neurotransmitters in animal brains, though it’s not yet known what they do in plants. Intriguingly, drugs such as Prozac, Ritalin, and methamphetamines can disrupt these “neurotransmitters” in plants.
Vital Capacities
Plants sense light, but they also communicate with one another using chemicals. They “know” when they’re being touched. They integrate all of this information without the kind of neural system that animals have.
And they have memory—the ability to store and recall an event at a later time. A Venus flytrap, for instance, doesn’t chomp down when it receives its first sensation of a fly; it only closes if the hairs in its trap sense another contact within a half minute or so. It “remembers” the first touch.
More surprising is the result of an experiment that Mancuso carried out with Mimosa pudica, the “touch-me-not” plant. He and colleagues dropped potted mimosas repeatedly onto foam from 15 centimeters (about 6 inches) above. The plants closed their leaves in response to the fall initially, but stopped doing so after four to six drops. It seems that they “learned” that there was no danger. It’s not that they were no longer able to close their leaves—they still would do so in response to touch. They retained this ability to discriminate between the harmless fall and the potentially harmful (about to be eaten) touch after a month.
Consciousness?
Frantisek Baluska at the University of Bonn, Germany, has pushed further into the question of consciousness by suggesting that plants may even experience pain. They release the chemical ethylene when stressed—when being eaten, attacked, or cut. Nearby plants can sense the ethylene. One researcher equated this release of ethylene with a scream. Since plants also produce the chemical in large quantities when their fruit are ready to be eaten, there’s conjecture that they’re using ethylene as an anesthetic (animals can also be knocked out with ethylene, an anesthetic).
Psychologists and philosophers will likely debate the precise definition of intelligence until the end of time. It may in truth blend into the whole continuum of biological capacities—faculties of various kinds, particularly sensation and memory, that seem to exist throughout the animal world. But as we realize that plants have significant abilities in sensation, awareness, integration of information, long-term memory, and adaptive learning, we must at least leave open the possibility that intelligence is certainly not unique to humans and probably not even to animals.
What It Means for Us
Admitting the possibility that plants may be intelligent—and perhaps conscious—not only brings up many questions about our instrumental (what’s in it for me?) relationship with the rest of nature. It also gives us fodder to rethink the human place in the natural world. I wrote previously that it’s long overdue for us to stop thinking of humans as the only conscious animals. If powerful capabilities long thought unique to humans exist not only in other animals but in plants as well, we must truly begin to see greater continuity between ourselves and the rest of nature.
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1. Anil Anathaswamy, “Roots of Consciousness,” New Scientist, 6 December 2014, pp. 34–37.
2. Anil Anathaswamy, “Roots of Consciousness,” New Scientist, 6 December 2014, pp. 34–37.
3. Anil Anathaswamy, “Roots of Consciousness,” New Scientist, 6 December 2014, p. 36.
4. Anil Anathaswamy, “Roots of Consciousness,” New Scientist, 6 December 2014, p. 36.
Plants have intelligence and feelings. That means you mustn't eat them.
SALAD IS MURDER!
You must follow ypur principles and begin starving yourself immediately.
...but that's a bit of a simplistic response. I didn't express any such principles in the article.
Clearly, life requires eating other life. Not much way to get around that!
This is an old and weird idea, but some people actually advocated speaking nicely to their houseplants in order to help them grow. I'm not a houseplant person myself (cats), but I do always feel a unique sense of peace out walking in the woods among the trees. I wouldn't be surprised that plants do have some kind of consciousness.
This article only shows that we as humans can detect other "intelligences" other than our own. The fact that all life shares basic fundamental biochemistry and genetic code seems clear that some basic "intelligence" or will to live or what have you, is universal. Our ability to categorize and describe and experiment is unique to our evolution, but probably all life has evolved out in different directions, in ways we can't begin to detect as we may not have that particular ability ourselves (so it is invisible to US). The video of the plant is nice, but all life forms from the lowest bacteria on are chemoresponsive. So that video is nothing new at all. Just pretty to watch. Look at slime molds and bacteria. They all do it..... I guess we as humans, since we invented the word, define intelligence but in my own reality, all living beings have an intelligence. So we need to respect all as much as we can, and still live (ie, we have to eat SOMETHING - so why be so animal-centric about it. Can we be humane about the way we raise and slaughter what we need to eat, as non-photosynthesizing beings? YES. That's all we CAN do, without starving to death!
"Can we be humane about the way we raise and slaughter what we need to eat, as non-photosynthesizing beings? YES. That's all we CAN do, without starving to death!"
I assert that yes, we can definetely be humane while eating meat or plants. But in the way in which we raise and breed our animals today, i.e. the present meat industry, is NOT humane. The way we treat our animals today is a lot worse than any other living being on this planet has ever treated another species.
My conclusion: it's not about what kind of food, but ultimately how it is produced/treated.
I agree with you, Amos. The problem becomes how to know just how your food is produced. It's very difficult today for most food, though some information is sometimes available. Often, the best way to avoid animal suffering is to avoid buying animal products altogether.
"The way we treat our animals today is a lot worse than any other living being on this planet has ever treated another species."
So the way we treat our animals is worse than how, for example, the tarantula hawk treats tarantulas? It paralyzes the tarantula using its sting and then lays its eggs on top of the spider. Then, when the larva hatch, they eat the tarantula alive, saving the vital organs for last so it can be alive for as long as possible while they eat it.
I think you're being a bit hyperbolic.
If I input data into a calculator and it outputs a response, is it too sentient? Can it experience pain or does it just process data in a way that doesn't involve sentience?
Plants like all known lifeforms can detect and respond to stimuli however there is nothing to suggest this is a conscious process. So I would ask: isn't pain PERCEPTION a conscious phenomenon? The entire idea behind pain is that our unconscious body offloads these stimuli onto the conscious mind so that we may apply problem-solving to avoid the pain. We can experience pain on many levels, even the existential, psychological pain of having to solve a great many problems in our lives all while being consciously aware of our existence in the universe and even the futility of existence...
Plants, on the other hand, do not possess enough logical processing circuits to perceive suffering, they can merely respond to a wide variety of stimuli in preprogrammed ways. They are in essence rudimentary calculators, if even since many of their responses are predetermined by their physiology. They are in essence automatons and I would find it very hard to believe they could experience pain and suffering like animals.
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