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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Science Memes
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This is why when people laugh at me for saying things like trees have concsiousness, and are kinda racist, I dont care. Science needs to catch up to intuition sometimes and Im not good at math so Im not going to be able to prove that tree's have a rudimentary form of cognition and intention.
Anyways, someone else already proved trees make decisions, cant remember where I read it but a big oak will feed baby oaks via root contact, and will feed certain other trees too, but not as much, because it favours its own species.
Biologist here. I promise I’m not laughing at you.
While I’d be a bit cautious about throwing around a word like “consciousness” without defining it, you’re absolutely right. Trees, and pretty much every living thing, are aware of their environment. They’re capable of communication and coordinated responses to threats. They have complex and intricate lifecycles and many levels of interactions with other plants and animals. One of the more profound passages I read (from Jurassic Park, whose author I otherwise detest) had the paleobotanist comment something along the lines that everyone sees plants as a background against which animals act, but they’re their own ecosystem, just as much red in tooth and claw (or cooperative, if you prefer) as any group of dinosaurs.
Being one of those weird theoretical biologists, I’d even let you get away with using a word like “intent” as long as we mean “a learned and stereotyped response to an environmental condition.” Oaks aren’t debating the meaning of life, and they’re not deciding in a sense more meaningful than an “if then else” kind of clause. I mean, I don’t think humans have free will either, so I’m not just ragging on trees here - but that’s a different conversation. They make decisions like “if it’s been warming up for a while and getting sunny, start making leaves again.” It’s genetic/evolutionary learning rather than neural, but it’s still learning. It’s just much slower.
It’s also not racist for oaks to feed other oaks any more than it’s racist for humans to eat corn. Or corn dogs.
I’m not going to get into the differences between group selection versus kin selection dynamics because that would break my New Year’s resolution.
Thank you for your information about your specialty and I found it very interesting. but also thank you for the info about Michael crichton! Your little offhand comment was the first I ever heard and so I searched, had no idea he was vocally against the science supporting global warming. Wild from an author that does scifi based on existing technology/theories and making it a horror thriller with mankind facing the consequences of their hubris.
AKA LIKE FUCKING CLIMATE CHANGE.
I know, right? I really liked him until I ended up working at the institute where he regularly interfaced to get some of his ideas. I knew the guy who was the basis for the character of Ian Malcolm - Jeff Goldblum’s character. He was an economist rather than a biologist, but the cool thing is that if you’re working in complex systems theory it doesn’t really matter.
Anyway, I think the book that turned me off was called Prey. It was something about nanotechnology and complex systems. It was just so completely wrong in every scientific detail that it was jarring. I could deal with the suspension of disbelief for things like Jurassic Park, but the grey goo stuff was just so far outside of established science that it made me look at all of his other writings.
I can still enjoy some of his works and some of the films made from them, but there’s always this aftertaste like I’m enjoying something from L Ron Hubbard, you know?
Thank you for taking the time to write such an informed response :)
I personaly belive their 'thought proccess' as limited as it is functions via the movement and increase/decrease of hormones. I think this because of how you can make marijuana plants do different things by adjusting their light cycles and ambient temperatures, or just blowing an oscillating fan over them and trimming them a certain way. That is just my uneducated guess
I definetly dont think trees are holding debate forums lol
Do you think bonsais in them little pots get lonely for other trees?
jesus dude. This reads like a LARP, and you missed the previous posts point entirely.
I mean...
/facepalm
Would speciest have suited you better? Obviously trees dont know about our social construct of race
I just want to know how trees have any kind of bias that isn’t directly related to their needs for survival and growth.
OP feels it, science better catch up with this and you'll see
Calling it racism kind of downplays the massive amount of genocide associated with actual racism.
What you explained is more like nepotism, which is rampant among the animal kingdom and beyond.
Im going to avoid saying that in the future, lesson learned
In a lot of cases it could also just be self preservation, a lot of these networks are basically nodes of a single organism which has reproduced through cloning for the express purpose of achieving these more extended intertwined root systems to have a wider range to pull water and nutrients from.
The world's largest organism is one of these tree to tree networks.
"Trees are assholes" - Randy Hickey
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-8922-1 ;)
Happy to share the pdf. Quanta also has a bunch of articles on plant "cognition." They are very much living, aware beings.
Another fun fact is that some insects are capable of recognizing human faces. Their vision might actually be way better than ours and they're not all that stupid. It just seems that way because their brains work fundamentally different to ours. Decades of bad science stemming from deeply rooted human supremacism have blinded us to the wonders of the natural world and we're just starting to unravel all of that.
To be honest, it kind of makes me sad. Is the fresh totatoe I eat alive when I bite it?
Growing things are alive, that's how they grow.
If it makes you feel better, many plants want their seeds to be eaten so they can be spread. Tomatoes are just a package around the seeds, the green stems are the plants 'body'. It's more like eating semen than eating a person.
I can get behind that
You could have just said that straight away. Not an issue for anyone on lemmy if you are into eating semen, you didn't need say trees are racist
I was using our social construct of race as a (bad) metaphore for species selection when deciding how much to support other trees. But now a second person is digging at it, thats a sign for me to discard that descriptor in future conversations. And only plant semen for me please.
There’s a type of vegetarianism/veganism that only eats plants that “want” to be eaten. Specifically, many plants produce fruits that hold seeds. They make the fruits bright and tasty (which tbh usually means “sweet” but you get the point) so that animals will come along and eat them.
Plants have a problem. They can t walk. That means that any of their offspring are going to grow up right next to them, competing with them for resources. There’s a lot of different ways of dealing with this phenomenon, but one common way is for the plant to bribe an animal to move its seeds further away by wrapping it in something delicious. This is what happens with plants that depend on pollinators like bees - which give pollen to get more mobile organisms to move their genes over there somewhere) and with ones who produce seeded fruits and berries which will pass through an animal’s digestive tract relatively unscathed and wind up in a nutrient rich environment far from itself. There’s also wind-based pollination and different lifecycles and so on, but the point is that being eaten is the entire point of producing fruit - for the most part.
Anyway, that class of people are called “fructarians.” It’s not actually a super healthy diet for a human and I do not recommend it. They intentionally steer away from plants like carrots because you can’t eat a carrot without killing the carrot plant, while you can eat an apple without killing an apple tree, if that makes sense.
In any case, while I respect the motivation, I think it’s going over the top. While I’ll always try to support people’s choices in things like diets and morality, it really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny after a point. I’ve read about religions that encourage people to sweep the road ahead of them as they walk so as to not step on an insect, and who strain their water so as not to accidentally consume what they consider to be a tiny animal. The truth is that you’re messing things up left and right while sweeping in front of you, and anything that does actually get caught in your filter is almost certainly going to die almost instantly.
There was an embarrassingly long time when we thought that animals (and even human children) could not feel pain. This was obviously wrong. At the same time, I don’t think we need to project an existential terror as being felt by a carrot.
https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-can-hear-themselves-being-eaten-researchers-have-discovered
https://daily.jstor.org/plants-know-when-they-are-being-eaten-and-they-fight-back/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd-h_y1X4oA
Dont tell the vegetarians I guess
The extreme of ethical veganism would be fruitarianism, where you only eat (botanical) fruits, i.e. that which plants give freely in exchange for spreading and fertilizing their seed
Yeah, you are eating their children.
Ideally, you're providing their children a nourishing, nitrogen-rich environment to begin their growth. Practically, they get flushed.
I'll be damned, this could explain why the Pope shits in the woods.
“Or… do.” - the angry …what would the term be for some one who eats only artificial foods? The angry that-guy.
Plants release VOCs which is basically their way of screaming. Once I learned about that I immediately looked up how to do photosynthesis.
That moment when it sounds like somebody was watching too much Avatar while high on shrooms, but he's actually referencing recent science.
Science needs descriptive language, repeatable experiments and people who enjoy putting them together.
The intersection between that and reality is actually quite miniscule.
I love your username, Dr_Satan