[HN Gopher] Plants can detect sound
___________________________________________________________________
Plants can detect sound
Author : lxm
Score : 181 points
Date : 2023-09-18 01:29 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| qlm wrote:
| Boquila trifoliolata appears to mimic surrounding leaves and the
| mechanism is currently unknown. One (controversial) hypothesis is
| that it has some sort of vision.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila
| monlockandkey wrote:
| Wow this is insane. I wonder if this could have real world
| application?
| fellowmartian wrote:
| Plant-based surveillance cameras, obviously.
| dtjb wrote:
| >"This is a deeply flawed article based on a poorly designed
| experiment and reflects significant author bias in the
| interpretation of the results," wrote Washington State
| University horticultural physiologist Linda Chalker-Scott in a
| blog post earlier this year.
|
| https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/can-plants-see-in...
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > One hypothesis is that volatile organic compounds emitted
| from host plant leaves induce a phenotypic change in nearby B.
| trifoliolata leaves. By receiving different host signals into
| its system, it is able to create specific signals and hormones
| in its tissues to regulate gene transcription of leaf
| morphology and developmental pathways for leaf
| differentiation.[12] The other hypothesis is that there could
| be horizontal gene transfer between the host and B.
| trifoliolata. A separate study also conducted by Gianoli et al.
| suggests that bacterial agents, which could mediate a
| horizontal gene transfer, may play a role in leaf mimicry by B.
| trifoliolata.
|
| See, here are two perfectly reasonable explanations for the
| mimicry that don't involve "seeing" anything.
|
| > A 2021 paper suggested that the plant has some sort of vision
| using ocelli. This hypothesis was presented on the basis of
| experiments in which the vine appeared to mimic plastic vines
| and artificial plants.
|
| Plastic vines and artificial plants too!? There go those two
| theories.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Plants having some form of vision doesn't that extraordinary of
| an idea to me. They can clearly detect light because of
| photosynthesis. Plants will also grow/turn towards the light.
| Ie they have a way to detect light. It doesn't seem that crazy
| to me that they could have some mutation that uses the
| information the plant gets from light.
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| Paper on the experiment, where they test if the plant will
| mimic the leaves of an artificial plastic plant:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/
|
| Quite a read, I hope others replicate the study, because this
| is fascinating. If we're able to really point in the direction
| that the plant uses vision to mimic other plants leaves (even
| artificial plant), I wonder how that vision works!
| dncornholio wrote:
| There should have been multiple types mimic-leaves because we
| cannot rule out this is the plants normal growth.
|
| Also should have let the plant grow without any mimic leaves
| and with an actually growing plant.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> There should have been multiple types mimic-leaves
| because we cannot rule out this is the plants normal
| growth._
|
| From the Wikipedia article [0] linked by the GP:
|
| _> Ernesto Gianoli said "Boquila's leaves are
| extraordinarily diverse. The biggest ones can be 10 times
| bigger than the smallest, and they can vary from very light
| to very dark. In around three-quarters of cases, they are
| similar to the closest leaf from another tree, matching it
| in size, area, length of stalk, angle, and color. Boquila's
| leaves can even grow a spiny tip when, and only when, it
| climbs onto a shrub with spine-tipped leaves."[5]_
|
| _> When there are no nearby host leaves to influence them,
| the normal leaves of B. trifoliolata are relatively short
| and light green with rounded edges.[6]_
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila
| archsurface wrote:
| "Plants don't have ears." - Learn something new every day.
| slimsag wrote:
| This seems verifiably false, too. Why else would it be called
| an 'ear' of corn?
| archsurface wrote:
| [flagged]
| eclecticfrank wrote:
| Don't trust everything on the internet. At least some plants
| have ears. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_(botany)
| archsurface wrote:
| Equivocation fallacy.
| endorphine wrote:
| Perhaps a better title would be: "Plants can detect sound".
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| [dead]
| signa11 wrote:
| in this regard, i am always reminded of pioneering (in true sense
| of that word) work of jagdish-chandra-bose
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose).
|
| it truly is fascinating !
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Ahem, that is Sir Jagdesh.
|
| :)
| signa11 wrote:
| ah yes, ofcourse ! i stand corrected...
| adolph wrote:
| This post definitely needs a link to the wonderful book by Ed
| Yong, An Immense World. Given all that even simple animals can
| sense and affect, it is not surprising that plants will hold
| further sensory surprises.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal/dp...
| noman-land wrote:
| This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to me
| why our senses are not all just considered touch? Molecules touch
| your tongue and you taste things. Molecules touch your nose and
| you smell things. Air vibrates your inner ear hairs and you hear
| things. Photons hit your eyes and you see things (not sure if
| this counts but it seems like it could).
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Touch is measuring motion or sustained pressure. Taste doesn't
| care about how hard the molecules hit your taste receptors,
| only if they bind to the taste receptors or not. Our eyes don't
| measure the photon pressure[1], the photons react with the
| atoms in our photoreceptor cells[2] triggering an
| electrochemical process.
|
| Our sense of hearing is the closest to touch. We have hairs on
| our body which is part of our sense of touch, which react to
| motion and pressure, both from physical objects and the air
| around us.
|
| Similarly the hairs in our ears react to the pressure waves of
| the air around us. However a big difference is that they're
| shielded by the ear drum and don't react to sustained pressure,
| only relatively high-frequency air pressure changes.
|
| Why we call them different things is mostly because they're
| used for different tasks. An electrical generator and an
| electrical motor can be the same thing, it's just what it's
| used for.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_phototransduction
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| If you're going to categorise senses into the usual five,
| which is what seems to be going on here, then hot, cold and
| pain are going to count as "touch" too. Those aren't about
| measuring motion so this explanation doesn't seem to work.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Hot and cold do measure motion, if we want to be very
| technical (since temperature is just a measure of the
| average momentum of molecules).
|
| Pain should probably be considered a separate sense indeed,
| though it can also be argued it is something different from
| the senses themselves, since it is fully internal, it
| doesn't reveal some fact about the outside world.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| _Trigger warning: description of medical procedure._
|
| Yes pain seems more like the interpretation of sense
| data, like if something sounds nice or tastes good?
|
| When I had an operation under local anesthetic I still
| felt the knife cutting into me, but was able to interpret
| it as not painful? This is how opiates (for pain relief)
| have been described to me -- still allowing you to feel
| the sensations but allowing you to not 'feel' the pain.
|
| Perhaps seeing with human biology knowledge can tell me
| why this is wrong!?
| memen wrote:
| > Although in some cultures five human senses were
| traditionally identified as such (namely sight, smell,
| touch, taste, and hearing), it is now recognized that there
| are many more.
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Yes of course (e.g. orientation from inner ear;
| proprioception; and others). But the context of the
| conversation was about the traditional understanding of
| "touch". I was trying to avoid the commenter I was
| replying to backing out of their point saying that they
| considered hot/cold and pain to be separate senses.
| throwaway_ab wrote:
| Sure, any interaction between our bodies and the universe can
| be considered an interaction of touch.
|
| All of our senses involve some form of matter/energy touching
| us.
|
| - Photons touching our retina cells...
|
| - Molecules touching our taste buds...
|
| - Air molecules touching our ear hairs...
|
| - Some amount of matter or electromagnetic energy touching our
| skin...
|
| - Molecules touching our olfactory sensory neurons...
|
| IMO we do not describe them as all just being touch as:
|
| 1) Saying they all are touch doesn't help differentiate the
| different senses and how they work.
|
| 2) It's a bit too low level.
|
| This is similar to saying there is no need for the separate
| disciplines of biology & chemistry because it's all just
| physics after all. So we might as well dump those subjects
| completely.
|
| Imagine being introduced to science at school but there is only
| one subject, physics, so you only "eventually" learn chemistry
| & biology through the lens of their physical atomic
| interactions.
|
| Imagine trying to describe a cell through the frame of atomic
| interactions and no higher level abstractions allowed.
|
| All science being physics is far less useful than being able to
| step over the base level going's on and make higher level
| abstractions so that you work at the appropriate
| "topology/focus/subdivision" level for the scientific
| discipline in question.
|
| Anyways that's what I thought of when considering all senses
| are touch, it's just a bit too low level and ambiguous to be
| useful.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| "The map is not the territory."
|
| - Alfred Korzybski
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
| jraph wrote:
| I would say: for useful abstraction. Both when speaking about
| them in everyday life, and studying them.
| emrah wrote:
| They could be. We have words to describe the special types of
| touch so we can differentiate them
| Propelloni wrote:
| You might enjoy reading Hermann von Helmholtz' and Ernst Mach's
| writings on sensory perception. If you do, you could do worse
| then to continue to read up on category philosophy. A seminal
| work would be Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
| rafale wrote:
| I think collision or interaction are better words. The word
| touch is meant for bigger objects, like hands, animals,
| furniture, fabrics, not molecules and electromagnetic
| radiation.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > This may sound like a dumb question but can anyone explain to
| me why our senses are not all just considered touch?
|
| It is a dumb question. How would categorizing all our senses as
| "sense of touch" be in anyway useful? Why would we categorize
| obviously different things that work entirely differently as
| the same because, "at the end of the day, everything is atoms"
|
| "Did you lose both your sense of touch and your sense of touch
| when you got COVID?"
|
| "No, I thankfully, I only lost my sense of touch."
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Sort of reminds me of the argument that nothing can be
| artificial because we, as natural beings are making said things
| and thus following the chain, everything is technically
| originated from nature.
|
| It's technically correct and does highlight that calling
| something artificial doesn't make it inherently inferior to
| something natural, but if we extended the meaning of natural
| like that, the term artificial would become meaningless while
| the need to distinguish between the "naturalness" of a CPU vs a
| plant would remain.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I recommend you check out An Immense world by Ed Yong - many
| senses are arguably 'touch tuned for something'. Though taste
| and smell and vision are not.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Isn't touch a biological pressure sensor though? Could be
| similar to hearing, sure, but taste, smell and sight are
| definitely more like chemical and electromagnetic sensors.
| Calavar wrote:
| If you want to get that reductive, ultimately everything in the
| universe is just particles and forces and interactions between
| them, and any concepts beyond that are arbitrary lines drawn by
| us humans in an attempt to organize the chaos.
|
| In the case of senses, it's about perception. We perceive the
| signals from our retinas differently than the ones from our
| fingertips, so we give them different names (sight vs. touch).
|
| There are also differences in the "hardware" -- sight and touch
| signals start with different kinds of receptors, travel down
| different nerves, and are processed in different parts of the
| brain -- but the hardware differences don't map 1:1 to the way
| that we categorize senses. For example, pain and pressure are
| processed by entirely different types of receptors, but we
| still call them both touch. On the flip side, balance and
| hearing share a lot of the same hardware, but we consider them
| to be different senses.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Similar to a question I had in physics class at school, which
| was quickly brushed aside by the teacher, who wanted to
| continue with the content: Why is temperature one of the base
| units? Isn't temperature just movement as well? Nowadays I know
| I was more or less right. Just that 1 molecule moving hardly
| makes temperature and one probably needs a large number.
| yyyk wrote:
| - The average movement of a solid is often zero, while its
| temperature is usually higher.
|
| - Movement has an implied direction even if we ignore it
| sometimes. Temperature does not.
|
| - A gas molecule can move a lot but have low temperature
| because it has little to collide with.
|
| It's more accurate to talk about vibration/collisions rather
| than movement.
| [deleted]
| truculent wrote:
| Because all those things feel different to touch
| IshKebab wrote:
| Because that would be an incredibly useless categorisation of
| very different senses.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| touch isn't one sense either. You have separate organs in the
| skin for high and low frequency vibrations, pressure, and more.
|
| Merkel's disks (close to surface, sense edges and slight
| pressure) Meissner corpuscles (close to surface, sense fine
| vibrations) Pacinian corpuscles (Deep, sense low frequency
| vibrations and heavy pressure) Ruffini endings (Sense skin
| stretching)
|
| Not to mention other touch-like senses like pain, heat/cold,
| and burns. There are also separate dedicated mechanisms for
| erogenous zones (Krause end-bulbs) Your brain does a fine job
| interpreting all of these together but they are totally
| different biological mechanisms
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| > but can anyone explain to me why our senses are not all just
| considered touch
|
| s/considered/named/ , if everything were called "touch" then
| we'd need new language to differentiate between stuff
| interacting with visible light, air pressure waves, etc. \
|
| The other question is can the sense of "touch" be broken down
| further? And the answer is yes, there are distinct "sense of
| touch" systems that measure different kinds of movement
| (stretching, low frequency vibration, high frequency vibration,
| ...) and these are used in ways that may be surprising (e.g.
| feeling details of a surface is mediated more through
| vibrations than by "displacement/distance" type senses)
|
| also for building practical intuition, they can be temporarily
| turned off via adaptation - i.e. hold on to something vibrating
| at 20Hz for a few minutes, now you've blown out the Meissner's
| Corpuscle / low freq system while retaining the others
|
| Some intro material below -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatosensory_system - ht
| tps://pressbooks.umn.edu/sensationandperception/chapter/mechano
| receptors-draft/ - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics
| /neuroscience/mechanoreceptor -
| chapters are on scihub: https://sci-
| hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-4377-2411-0.00024-1
| yieldcrv wrote:
| next up: plants suffer and try to avoid suffering, vegans die out
| due to inability to reduce suffering or move the goal post to
| something selfishly convenient just like everyone else.
|
| just a matter of time.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| It should be a red flag when you're hoping for huge shake-up
| discoveries in the future to justify your behavior today.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I believe plants are valid organisms that avoid negative
| stimuli and that this undermines 'suffer' based consumption
| arguments
|
| There are other plant consumption / meat avoidance
| preferences I am completely fine with
| 0daystock wrote:
| Flawed argument because animals still eat 10x the amount of
| plants vegans do. So if plant suffering was a legitimate
| concern, one would still be vegan, which is a lifestyle to
| reduce harm to animals.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| there are plenty of reasons to be avoid eating meat that have
| nothing to do with reducing harm to animals.
|
| and animals consuming plants has nothing to do with any of
| your observations. If this was a standardized test prompt,
| your first sentence would be erroneous information.
| petemir wrote:
| Surely this study has been funded by the meat industry.
| patrickscoleman wrote:
| Just read "The Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham (1951)[1].
| It's a great, classic horror sci-fi novel where plants can hear
| and talk to each other. Big influence for "Annihilation" and "28
| Days Later." Gotta love it when some crazy fictional idea turns
| out to have some factual (?) basis.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids
| kilolima wrote:
| I think Annihilation is more a shameless remake of Stalker, as
| far as going into a "Zone" where an alien influence has changed
| the nature of reality.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Similar structure, yes.
|
| The questions about the realness of the Zone and the motives
| of the characters, allowed for much deeper and broader
| implications.
|
| Annihilation was more specific and overlapped too much with
| explicit pre-existing myth(s), to be a remake of Stalker.
| saberience wrote:
| I thought Annihilation is more of a re-thinking of HP
| Lovecrafts story "The Colour out of Space". You should
| totally read it, it's fantastically creepy and clearly
| influenced the film.
| gavinmckenzie wrote:
| I thought the accepted explanation of Annihilation was a
| metaphor for cancer. The slow seemingly unstoppable spread.
| Mutations creating new things that mimic the familiar but in
| often grotesque ways, mechanistically expanding to
| destructively consume everything in its path into a new form
| of life.
| rocketbop wrote:
| Annihilation reminded me of Ballard's The Crystal World in
| which all living things are slowly but surely being consumed.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I wouldn't say Annihilation is in any way a remake of
| Stalker, shameless or not. It is clearly inspired by it a bit
| in terms of setting, but it has a very different message to
| say. Stalker was essentially a movie about faith.
| Annihilation is a movie about self-destruction, both in the
| destructive sense, but also as a necessary step to building a
| new self.
|
| The concept of a special zone where things are not the same
| as in normal reality is merely a shared motif.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think the setting is a pretty big part of Annihilation.
| The "about" is something that's shared by many different
| works, but the setting is a bit more unusual.
|
| So while I don't agree that it's a shameless remake, I
| would say the most distinctive thing about it is the
| setting, and so to some extent it's a fair cop.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If we go into details about the setting, it is still
| vastly different from Stalker. The Zone in Stalker is
| only vaguely and mysteriously abnormal, in a subtle,
| mostly faith-based kind of way.
|
| By contrast, the Zone in Annihilation is very overtly
| supernatural, and in very specific ways that are
| important to the point it's trying to make - merging and
| recombining humans and the problems that face them, and
| manifesting internal struggles externally. To be fair,
| the Zone in Roadside Picnic, the novel Stalker adapts, is
| also more overtly supernatural, but still in a very
| different way.
|
| I really don't think it's fair to consider Stalker or
| Roadside Picnic anything more than inspiration for
| Annihilation.
| throw0101b wrote:
| The move _Annihilation_ was based on the book of the same
| name (first of a trilogy):
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_(VanderMeer_nove
| l...
| patrickscoleman wrote:
| VanderMeer wrote the introduction for the new (Modern
| Library) edition of "The Day of the Triffids"!
| jingles_dev wrote:
| In my studies, we place EEG electrode on them, they produce
| different amount of electrical signals in different conditions
| too.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Piezoelectric sensors can hear! /s
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I ththought of this:
| https://youtu.be/b9UO9tn4MpI?si=JhvoaRUdBLed-LBR
| Fnoord wrote:
| This one of the same author is equally interesting [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGmlDY2sDg8
| Fnoord wrote:
| I thought of this [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Plants
| borissk wrote:
| Crazy russians :)
| [deleted]
| IshKebab wrote:
| I was reading about this last week and the thing that struck me
| is that _every_ experiment was "plants respond more to <musical
| genre> than <other musical genre>", or male voices vs female
| voices or swearing vs compliments.
|
| It's total pseudoscience designed to generate comedy science
| articles and press releases.
|
| If anyone actually cared about this they'd be playing sine waves
| and white noise at various frequencies and amplitudes. You'd see
| a graph of growth vs frequency or whatever.
|
| I couldn't find anything like that though. Does this article have
| it (can't read due to paywall).
| lacrimacida wrote:
| Science for clicks
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I guess this answers the question If a Tree Falls in the Forest
| and There's No One Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound? yes
| the trees do hear it.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, so I wonder if my plants would do better if I recorded jungle
| sounds and played them back when I'm not at home.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| There were quite some experiments in that direction, but using
| music. I don't recall the name or have a link to such a study
| at hand (and I do question and never researched how scientific
| it was done) but the plants seemed to prefer Ravi Shankar
| instead of Heavy Metal.
| sebmellen wrote:
| Mother Earth's Plantasia -- _warm earth music for plants and the
| people who love them_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZkR3PyHTs0
| Modified3019 wrote:
| As an aside, insects often use their feet to "hear" vibrations
| from the plant they are standing on, allowing them to seemingly
| "silently" communicate with others on that plant by transmitting
| vibrations through it, or detect when an animal is coming along.
|
| Notably in my experience, corn rootworm beetle were especially
| adept at hearing me walking along through corn and hiding before
| there was any possibility of seeing me. I'd have to stop and be
| still for a minute for them to start crawling about again.
| belter wrote:
| Why the change in the title? It is not the original and there is
| nothing clikbaity about it. Is HN now editorializing the
| Economist?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The "plants don't have ears" part of the original title was, at
| best, unnecessarily folksy.
| belter wrote:
| Guidelines say: "Otherwise please use the original title,
| unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I'm saying is probably click bait.
| lmpdev wrote:
| Concision?
| borissk wrote:
| Unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/SVoRk
| fortran77 wrote:
| Corn has ears.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Fortran77: 1
|
| The Economist: 0
| borissk wrote:
| And a strong political lobby in US :)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Corn are Legal People?
| bpanon wrote:
| "The Secret Life of Plants" is a great book on this subject.
| darkflame91 wrote:
| Roald Dahl wrote a short story, 'The Sound Machine' that's on
| very similar lines. Looks like it can be found in its entirety
| here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-
| mach...
| euroderf wrote:
| Oh wow. I've been trying to find that story for decades but
| couldn't remember title or author. I read it as a teenager and
| it left an impression. Thank you for posting!
| mecsred wrote:
| I understand that this is probably my ignorance making me kind of
| an ass here, but my gut response is "obviously?". They're
| pressure waves, literally forces acting directly on the plant!
| Imagine reporting that plants can grow differently if you grab
| them and yank them around a bit every once in a while.
| bobbiechen wrote:
| I think it's interesting to contrast to vision/light:
| similarly, there is a physical effect which we can perceive
| "from a distance". But vision varies wildly even among animals,
| and there are plenty of wavelengths of light that we can't
| perceive. I enjoyed a brief discussion of this in Andy Weir's
| The Martian (no spoilers here).
| borissk wrote:
| I won't be surprised if single cell organisms, even prokaryotes
| can detect and react to sound - just a matter of more research to
| find out how.
| addaon wrote:
| > I won't be surprised if single cell organisms, even
| prokaryotes can detect and react to sound
|
| It would have to be pretty insanely high in the ultrasound. A
| 30 kHz (above the top of usual audible sound range) wave is
| around 10 mm (10000 um) in wavelength; a typical prokaryote is
| of order 1 um. While there are some uses for MHz-scale
| ultrasound, the attenuation starts getting pretty insane --
| there's just not much energy at the scale of gigahertz sound to
| detect.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Why would you assume that the order of magnitude of the
| animal is similar to the wavelength? Elephants can
| communicate with as low as 1hz. The wavelength of that is
| over 300m.
|
| If the amplitude is high enough, human too can comfortably
| "feel" infrasonic.
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| Imagine an elevator that moves up and down its shaft with a
| sinusoidal elevation over time. Riding in that elevator, one
| could detect frequencies with quite long wavelengths compared
| to the size of a person.
|
| A less abstract example is a boat at sea.
| borissk wrote:
| Interesting, but a longer wave will still have some impact,
| that can be detected by a smaller organism - or not?
| carapace wrote:
| There was an experiment where a scientist (I think it was Pask)
| built a cybernetic chemical machine in a petri dish. When the
| requirement to respond to sound was introduced, the machine grew
| "ears": spines of different lengths (that therefore vibrated at
| different resonant frequencies like the hairs in the inner ear.)
| (One of the most fascinating and terrifying experiments ever
| conducted IMO.)
|
| Then there was the famous case of the program optimized by
| genetic programming that wouldn't function correctly on any but
| the FPGA it was evolved on; the program had adapted itself to
| idiosyncrasies of the hardware that were invisible on the level
| of the specification.
|
| Just as Lord Kelvin's Thunderstorm _evolves_ an electric charge
| so evolution, uh, evolves whatever potentialities are there and
| adaptive.
|
| In sum, duh. Of course plants are sensitive to sound. The
| contradictory hypothesis would be that there's nothing useful to
| plants in their soundscape. And doesn't that sound obviously
| silly?
| aschearer wrote:
| They don't have eyes but can detect light, too...
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| they don't have feet but they can detect gravity too and grow
| vertically when they can
| pvaldes wrote:
| pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-criticism
| [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles in action.
|
| [1] Stop reading at "Plants living near a busy road have their
| grow stunt because noise", that is just the dumbest explanation
| available in the bag. Do they noticed that those areas are
| typically contaminated with heavy metals?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > pseudoscience, unability to apply the most basic self-
| criticism [1], and low quality papermills churning turd-ticles
| in action.
|
| This eloquently and entirely refutes all the claims, excellent
| work.
| yojo wrote:
| That's not what the article said. Verbatim quote (emphasis
| mine):
|
| "...marigolds and sage plants _exposed to the noise_ of traffic
| from a busy motorway suffered stunted growth"
|
| There's a link in the article with more details on the
| experimental design:
|
| "The plants were grown from seed and allowed to mature for two
| months in the same space before they were divided into two
| groups. One group was exposed to 73 decibels of traffic noise
| recorded from a busy motorway in Tehran for 16 hours a day. The
| other group was left to grow in silence. After 15 days had
| passed, samples were taken from the youngest fully expanded
| leaves on every plant in the experiment and studied."
|
| The plants were exposed to sound in a lab, with a control
| group. They were not actually next to a motorway.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Evolving that system still does not have sense from neither a
| biological point of view, nor from a common sense. This came
| from the (incorrect) assumption than nature is quiet.
|
| Exactly the opposite to what we can empirically observe: The
| tallest, fast growing plants live in extremely loudly places
| called rainforests. Only the ocean is louder
|
| 73Db is a joke. Many of the animals here are incredibly loud.
| Common coqui frogs sing all night long at 90 Db, 20,000 frogs
| in each hectare. The place is filled with cicadas, Howling
| Monkeys, and Wild Red fowl roosters competing to be the most
| annoying thing. Cotinga birds and friends sing at 110-125
| Db!. non stop, by day... Do we think that plants care about
| that? They couldn't grow faster.
| skeaker wrote:
| How do you explain the difference in growth rate under
| controlled conditions, then?
| pvaldes wrote:
| > How do you explain the difference in growth rate under
| controlled conditions, then?
|
| There is not a lack of candidates:
|
| Riding the academy game (plants must be sentient now,
| just because this is where the money is now), pure luck
| (moving more of the better genetics to one group just by
| random), cherry picking (The experiment results were
| publishable the 49th time, pffew), or giving your
| greyhound a helping hand without even noticing it. Choose
| one, there are much more other coming.
|
| This single study is irrelevant because is negated by a
| million of empirical observations in the real life. We
| need to just stop for a minute and apply some old good
| common sense.
|
| To start Tagetes and Salvia are two extremely popular
| plants cultured in every f*k roundabout of each big city
| in this planet.
|
| Because they grow perfectly well in this (really noisy)
| conditions. How I know this? Because I like culturing
| plants, so I know what to expect. And this knowledge does
| not came from academy. Is achieved killing a few tons of
| plants by mistake like I did, and trying again. This is
| what this teams seem to be lacking. They are blind to the
| big picture. They just believe what they want to believe.
|
| Moreover, Tagetes and Salvia are unrelated,
| representatives of two different families with two very
| different defense strategies. Why they would need to
| evolve the same sound sensors twice?.
|
| There are tens thousands of counterexamples in the real
| world, against this single result (But then you don't
| have a career, of course).
| skeaker wrote:
| > Riding the academy game (plants must be sentient now,
| just because this is where the money is now), pure luck
| (moving more of the better genetics to one group just by
| random), cherry picking (The experiment results were
| publishable the 49th time) or giving your greyhound a
| helping hand (and faking the results). Choose one, there
| are much more other coming.
|
| In other words, "they are liars," "they did not account
| for genetics and there just happened to be mutations that
| killed samples in one group," "they are liars," or "they
| are liars." To your credit, point 2 could have very well
| happened and I can't seem to find an actual citation in
| the article to determine that it didn't, but I dislike
| your reasons to doubt them on all other points. You could
| hardly trust anything at all following that logic.
|
| Not to say that I doubt your experience. They certainly
| didn't test every plant in existence under every possible
| condition. I am certain that their results don't apply to
| everything.
| [deleted]
| adyashakti wrote:
| this is old news. we were doing experiments with plants and music
| back in the 1960s. but nobody liked our results because we found
| that modern styles are toxic, and ancient vedic sacred chants are
| the most nourishing sound vibrations.
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