Share The Seeds
Botany and Research => Plant Science => Topic started by: Roze on April 26, 2014, 08:35:11 PM
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Scientists conduct a plant experiment that may make you rethink those veggie burgers ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGLABm7jJ-Y
After watching this video from Amazing Plants, you have to wonder - do plants feel pain?
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Oh wow. I'm going to have to start anesthetizing my cacti before I graft them. Lol.
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Vegetarians, your argument is invalid ! :P
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Thought provoking! +1 :)
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this was very interesting. it makes you really think.. I do think they feel something for sure, and they defiantly know when they are being damaged/ "hurt." It isn't pleasant for anything/anyone.. :(
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I read "Plants and the human Brain" by David O. Kennedy recently, it explains how plants release a cocktail of volatile signaling compounds, kind of like plant "pheromones", whenever leaves, stem or roots get cuts or bruises. This start a cascade signaling between the plants own leaves as well other plants nearby, neighbors that often doesn't even need to be related species. Plants got ways of "learning", they got cell receptors and they got complex hormonal type of communication but, lets be careful about calling it pain. its more like discomfort. When plants are fed on, which they are very used too, they respond by balancing replacement of lost tissue and producing feed detergents against the attacking invertebrates. Plants remember what works against specific attacking pests, but keep in mind that pain is very expensive physiologically, especially maintenance. If we look at insects they keep their neural system to minimum because it drain staggering amounts of energy, they also don't have pain since it doesn't improve survival any more than the same type of epigenetic memory they share both plants and us. Plants spend a lot of energy on producing chemicals, especially for defense against UV and insects, analyzing plant tissue for chemicals takes immense amounts of work because there is no end to the amount of different chemicals each of them produce.
That video also forgot to mention that all life is electric and that receptors are all build on the same framework, the g-protein coupled receptor, when signals are relayed from one cell to another there often a small electric pulse involved if the signal need to travel fast. Photosynthesis is also "electric". Thats why ether and chloroform will affect a lot of organisms and why trace amounts of hormones in human urine can boost root growth at the plants we piss on.
Sometimes I find it annoying when popular science has to oversimplify things to the point they are skipping a lot of the interesting details, just to write something sensational.
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This makes me wonder about the flip-side as well: Do they react to "nice touches"?
Hug a Tree,
Hcc
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I read "Plants and the human Brain" by David O. Kennedy recently, it explains how plants release a cocktail of volatile signaling compounds, kind of like plant "pheromones", whenever leaves, stem or roots get cuts or bruises. This start a cascade signaling between the plants own leaves as well other plants nearby, neighbors that often doesn't even need to be related species. Plants got ways of "learning", they got cell receptors and they got complex hormonal type of communication but, lets be careful about calling it pain. its more like discomfort. When plants are fed on, which they are very used too, they respond by balancing replacement of lost tissue and producing feed detergents against the attacking invertebrates. Plants remember what works against specific attacking pests, but keep in mind that pain is very expensive physiologically, especially maintenance. If we look at insects they keep their neural system to minimum because it drain staggering amounts of energy, they also don't have pain since it doesn't improve survival any more than the same type of epigenetic memory they share both plants and us. Plants spend a lot of energy on producing chemicals, especially for defense against UV and insects, analyzing plant tissue for chemicals takes immense amounts of work because there is no end to the amount of different chemicals each of them produce.
That video also forgot to mention that all life is electric and that receptors are all build on the same framework, the g-protein coupled receptor, when signals are relayed from one cell to another there often a small electric pulse involved if the signal need to travel fast. Photosynthesis is also "electric". Thats why ether and chloroform will affect a lot of organisms and why trace amounts of hormones in human urine can boost root growth at the plants we piss on.
Sometimes I find it annoying when popular science has to oversimplify things to the point they are skipping a lot of the interesting details, just to write something sensational.
isnt pain an arbitary word? If pain is defined as the body sensing damage then ALL living things experience it. It may be in degrees relating to an organisms ability to heal and the extent of the complexity of the nervous system(or its equivilent). Alot of insects dont live long enough to recover from an injury AND and exoskeleton is built differently from an endo skeleton...they have to wait for a molt or two to regenerate if they are capeable of healing in the first place. Then theres the getting used to factor. AKA pain threshold. Most wild organisms make us look like pussies. They can and do sustain much more damage that we could imagine without the benifit of medical science. We flat out dont understand things as well as we think we do. Plants are as used to being grazed as i am smashing my hands with a 1.5 lbs. hammer (i do it everyday for a living). It HURT like a bitch the first few times but now it dosent phase me at all. Pain is only an aknoledgement of damage done. Its not inheritley uncomfortable; as we know many plants evolved to be damaged in the name of reproduction and some evolved to be damaged purely to sustain the ecosystem. Just like I know when a nail is short or my aim is off when i hit my self with a framing hammer; it just dosent hurt like it used to.
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I think plants can experience pain. I also think they can experience pleasure when treated kindly. At least I treat my plants kindly. They seem much happier when I spend time with them each day, and if I go out of town for a few days they look droopy when I return.
Regardless of whether they can feel pain or not, imo, they deserve as much respect as any other living thing, after all they give us almost everything we depend on, from the air we breathe to medicines to the materials we construct our houses with to the food we eat. Not to mention all the knowledge they have imparted to the human mind since our species began and the spiritual growth they facilitate. I think people dismiss the idea of plant consciousness because we can have our way with them since they're stuck to the ground and can't fight back. If they could physically fight back when humans abuse them we would think twice.
Remember that movie "the happening"?
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On this video Professor Suzanne Simard shows that all trees in a forest ecosystem are interconnected, with the largest, oldest, "mother trees" serving as hubs. The underground exchange of nutrients increases the survival of younger trees linked into the network of old trees. Mycorrhizal fungi form obligate symbioses with trees, where the tree supplies the fungus with carbohydrate energy in return for water and nutrients the fungal mycelia gather from the soil; mycorrhizal networks form when mycelia connect the roots of two or more plants of the same or different species.
Check it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSGPNm3bFmQ
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This is a documentary by PBS called What Plants Talk About that gets into that same topic, plus a bunch of other cool stuff.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xrsYRJi3EGw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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On this video Professor Suzanne Simard shows that all trees in a forest ecosystem are interconnected, with the largest, oldest, "mother trees" serving as hubs. The underground exchange of nutrients increases the survival of younger trees linked into the network of old trees. Mycorrhizal fungi form obligate symbioses with trees, where the tree supplies the fungus with carbohydrate energy in return for water and nutrients the fungal mycelia gather from the soil; mycorrhizal networks form when mycelia connect the roots of two or more plants of the same or different species.
Check it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSGPNm3bFmQ
If I understand correctly, this research (or research like it) was where some of the concepts in the movie avatar (the tree of life, and the interconnection of all the trees) were inspired by.
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Plants respond to touch, damage, and various pests. While a plant can be hurt, plants lack a central nervous system to process stimuli and to experience it consciously as pain. A decent example would be a person with a severed spinal cord who had lost all sensation and movement below the waist. While the feet will still show physiological responses to injury and firing of pain receptors, the person will not feel any pain. Without the connection to a brain for processing, pain is not experienced. Nevertheless, be kind to plants. plant spirits don't like it when you bully their buddies.
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Its been a time I have this on my mind I might try outlining it:
I think human understanding of pain greatly depends on human perception of pain. Human perception of pain has been formed by evolution, pain served a purpose in our evolution and a slightly different purpose in plants, or lets say crustaceans.
I think a big difference is that humans are more likely to get infections, dismembering is irreversible and and and...
So for me I guess a plant or maybe a crustacean has a somewhat - or in the first case even greatly - different way of perceiving pain. Since yeah as said pain serves a purpose and depending on its evolutionary importance the perception will be different. Crustaceans for example are able to regenerate some parts in cases of dismemberment, yet instant and active reaction is one of their survival strategies. So if I make an educated guess a lobsters perception of pain is a bit less troubling than a humans. Many plants for comparison have the ability to regenerate large parts and have little to no ability for instant reaction (reflexes like move, run, fight...) thus I conclude evolution might habe given them pain, but not as we understand it as we can expect the perception in a plants case to be very different from the other examples.
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https://youtu.be/pvBlSFVmoaw
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That is amazing. Interspecies plant communicator! Widening my perspective on this issue
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plants absolutely react to stimuli. be it called pain or otherwise. their sensitivities and reactions are no doubt different, but absolutely they do exist.
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Excellent book on this subject
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You are confusing pain with a physical response.
Pain is a conscious, subjective experience whereas response is a physical reaction that takes place in the presence of external stimuli.
My mom is a neurologist and she told me of a phenomenon wherein a person can be without conscious experience - that is the regions of the brain responsible for subjective experience and suffering are dead or otherwise disconnected - but in response to a very specific stimulus, the facial muscles will contort and create a grimace.
Science has shown that plants do indeed respond to physical stimuli. This is not a surprise by any stretch of the imagination. However, a mechanical response to physical stimuli does not imply the capability to experience physical distress as a result of such stimuli. Suffering, from a neurological standpoint, is very advanced. It requires not only the capability to sense touch, but also sensory organs that can detect physical distress, some degree of cognition, and lastly and most importantly, some degree of awareness. If a creature possesses some but not all of these things, one could argue that that that creature can feel pain, but if a creature possesses none of these things, such as the case with plants, then there really is no case from a scientific standpoint.
Now we get to the philosophical implications of the question - if plants can indeed feel pain the argument follows that vegans and vegetarians would have to radically alter their lifestyle in order to accommodate their beliefs. This is not so. While it makes for a pointed dismissal to veganism as a whole, it neglects to consider the problem of trophic layering. The ten percent rule, stating that 90% of energy is lost (or rather, diffused due to entropy) when food moves upward through a trophic layer (Ie: 90% of the plant's energy is lost when consumed by the rabbit, 90% of the rabbit's energy is lost when consumed by the snake, and 90% of the snake's energy is lost when consumed by the eagle) is generous at best. This is why there are many more trees than deer and many more deer than wolves.
In other words, eating corn uses less corn than feeding that corn to a cow and then eating the cow, from which the only the socially acceptable cuts of meat are taken, which I might add are relatively nutrient poor. Using less corn, and using it judiciously, results in is less suffering. Veganism, contrary to its public reputation, is not a philosophy of absolutes. It is deeply utilitarian, in that it attempts to minimize the amount of suffering one inflicts on other conscious agents (within reason), not eradicate it entirely. Some of the practices of Jain ascetics and the philosophy espoused by anti-natalists are much more absolutist in comparison.
As for the newer research regarding mycelial networks, there is a lot of interesting research and discovery out there, but the science is often exaggerated. Mycelial communication is not evidence for cognition or subjective experience by any stretch of the imagination. Personally, I blame the popular science media for really misleading the public on that.
The science has been very, very clear in saying that there is simply no evidence that plants exhibit any form of physical cognition. That being said, as an animist I absolutely believe that in a mystical, non-physical realm, the ruling spirits of plants absolutely have cognition, intelligence, and subjective experiences. This is a complicated subject that is filled with nuance but to shorten it, what animists describe as plant consciousness is very different from physical cognition and we have to make sure not to confuse the two.
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I'm going to assume no unless convinced otherwise. Bring on the peer-reviewed research!