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Plants 'Recognize' Their Siblings
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jun 13, 2007 02:36 PM
from the family-tree dept.
from the family-tree dept.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that according to a recent study, Biologists have found that plants are able to recognize their own relatives. "Researchers at McMaster University have found that plants get fiercely competitive when forced to share their pot with strangers of the same species, but they're accommodating when potted with their siblings. [...] Though they lack cognition and memory, the study shows plants are capable of complex social behaviours such as altruism towards relatives, says Dudley. Like humans, the most interesting behaviours occur beneath the surface."
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Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a thought.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, first posted comment is a perfectly plausible alternate theory, why isn't that even considered in the article? Could it be, gasp, that saying that plants recognize and display altruism towards siblings gets more reads than that plants have displayed abnormal behavior towards those with similar genomes? This seems an awful lot like hyperbole to get more reads, or, to not attribute to malice what could be simple ignorance, perhaps it's simply that they thought people wouldn't understand it without something in normal life to compare it too...
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Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Or... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
I could much more easily go in the other direction.
Would you eat pigs, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat dogs/cats, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat dolphins, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat lemurs, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat organutangs, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat chimpanzees, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat genetically 50/50 human/chimpanzee crosses, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat 90/10 human/chimpanzee crosses, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Would you eat 100% humans, slaughtered industrially for meat?
Where's your ethical cutoff point? Why? I'd wager that it's a lot more arbitrary than my "the less functional neurons, the better" cutoff. Of course plants interact with their surroundings. Even unicellular organisms are remarkably complex systems with all kinds of feedback. But they're relatively easy to model. How many neurons do you think it would take, in an artificial neural net, to modify an arbitrary plant or single-celled organism behavior -- say, which direction to grow roots? Three, four perhaps? Now how many do you think it would take to model a mouse's decision on where and how to build its den based on its' life experiences (flooding, predators, warmth, etc)? Hundreds of thousands, millions perhaps? There's really no comparison.
To put some cutoff in the nervous systems of higher animals, however, you have to come up with some new "depth of thought and/or emotion" cutoff. Do so, and defend it with references to the scientific literature. I challenge you to do so. Even a lab mouse has metacognition and problem solving abilities. They don't have *your level* of problem solving abilities, and they don't have our language hardware (and it is due to built-in wiring; read up about the "Critical Period" where, if you don't learn language before then, you lose the ability to do so). But it's still pretty much the same thing.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't feel the need to justify ethically, to myself or anyone else, my choices of food. I simply eat what I feel like eating and don't eat what I don't want to eat. I see no reason to get 'ethics' involved in the decision really... unless you count things like: I'll try not to steal food from someone else, unless my own survival depends upon it.
That being said, I supp
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Where's your ethical cutoff point? Why?
I eat what's appealing, same as every other animal. Do I need another reason?
Frankly, I'm very comfortable with my place in the food chain. Nature is... natural.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hannibal? Is that you?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For every being, the concept of it finding an item 'appealing' has been honed by natural selection.
Cannibalism doesn't go well in a society like ours, and along with the possibility of prion diseases it has become an unappealing custom.
Since most of the time, living beings don't even think about what to eat, I guess for humans too, eating what it finds appealing should be quite proper.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have an alligator that tears a leg off a zebra, that zebra will still try to hobble away in order to survive.
Likewise, you can tear
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most human altruism appears to be from the same source: it began as something we extended to kin groups, and extended to others only as civilization developed further. I don't see what the value of calling it "abnormal" or a "mistake." It's a behavior that seems to help the species and does what it does regardless of how it came about.
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Genetic anyhow (Score:3, Informative)
They don't recognise "relatives," they just see material that is close enough to not be considered an intruder.
It doesn't quite work the same with people, as "relatives" or "siblings" can in fact be imported (re-marriage) or separated (divorce, adoption) and thus unrecognized.
Re: Reading way too much into this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Regardless, there are a number of possible reasons for the effect.
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Re:Or... (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer, I have been reading far too much Dawkins, I am not a biologist
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't anthropomorphise species which are not human, especially not within a scientific context like this.
Is it a valid move to anthropomorphise humans, which are animals? If humans share a characteristic with another animal species, is describing that characteristic anthropomorphizing? Or, to put it another way, if an animal species and Homo sapiens share a characteristic, is it an anthropomorphism to describe that characteristic? What are the criteria for determining which descriptions are anthropomorphic?
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, if I say the cat is 'afraid', in a scientific context, and you say to me, "Don't anthropomorphise that cat", how do we know that particular attribute ( the feeling of fear ) belongs solely to humans? Is it not possible that the cat has the same electro-chemical process happening in their brains that humans do when humans experience fear? Could a careless critic mistake a shared attributes between two animals species, such as both cats and human feeling fear, as a case of anthropomorphism? How are we to tell the difference between anthropomorphic reasoning and the correct identification of a characteristic between humans and another animal.
How did humans first 'own' the attribute of fearfulness that it might be considered and anthropomorphism to say that an animal is afraid? Doesn't such understanding of 'what it means to be human' actually come from our pre-scientific understanding of the world both culturally, ( as in what people believed about humans and animals in the middle ages ) and personally ( what an individual believed about humans and animals before they were exposed to scientific knowledge )?
In other words, have we scientifically validated every supposedly human attribute, so we know when we are anthropomorphising or not? I argue the answer is no. It's just an ad-hoc system that you can throw around at any time, almost entirely without guidelines, rules, or criteria. At various times we have said that animals do have emotions like humans, don't have emotions like humans, etc. None of it is really scientifically valid, because we don't have brain scans of wild animals running for their life through the jungle. Nor do we really have an electro-chemical definition of emotion, for that matter -- we know *where* in the brain it takes place, but we don't have an exact definition for the physical process of 'fear' or 'anger'. So we're not really sure if even *humans* have emotions like humans!
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Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the oldest questions in philosophy. How do I know that my experience of 'red' is the same as yours? There are various answers on both sides of the argument. But, if we assume or justify by reason that I know what your experience is because we are both 'human', then why can't we do the same for animals? After all, Chimpanzees have somewhere between 95%-99% simliar DNA to us; they have more or less the same brain with the same structures, minus maybe the language areas. We know that chimps don't have the language facility that humans do, but is it an anthropomorphism to say that they experience fear or anger?
For example, the limbic system in our brain somehow generates emotional experience. We don't know how it happens, nor do we have a electro-chemical definition of emotion, but we know that it's happening in the limbic system. The limbic system is structurally pretty similar in all of the great apes. So if you can say to me that you and I have the same 'kinds' of emotional experiences because we have the same limbic system, then I would tell you that you and I share our limbic structure with a chimpanzee. So then, couldn't we conclude that the chimpanzee has the same 'kinds' of emotional experiences that you and I do?
If you're claiming that 'we can't possibly know how it feels to feel in another species', I'm curious to know how you arrived at this conclusion. And how do you then know that you know how it 'feels' to 'feel' like another human being?
I'm not saying I have the answers, one way or the other. I'm saying that we need to make a more objective scientific criteria for claims of attributes of *any* animal, human or otherwise, and a methodology for comparing the attributes of different animals. One way to go about this is with objective measurements, like brain scans and comparative morphology of nervous systems. Comparative behavior is another method.
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Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Or... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The closer an organism is to your genetics the closer the instinctual bond. Parents, Children, brothers, and sisters. Then extended family and finally other humans. Then other lifeforms that are most similar to humans, mammals before reptiles and fish, animals before plants, and even plants are closer and therefore more sac
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You may think that's there's a big difference between the plant not trying to out-compete its sibling and
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The human equivalent of this situation would be if you receive an organ transplant. If it is close enough to you genetically, your body will accept it as part of itself, if it is not a tissue match, you body will identify it as foreign and you immune cells will attack and destroy it.
It doesn't matter if you think the organ is part of you or not, it's whether or not your imune cells recognise the familiar genes they are loo
Sharing (Score:5, Funny)
When will you learn?! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a nilegan for life! I won't harm another thing in this world, just to advance myself!
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Wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Do a google before you post next time so you don't look so ignorant.
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Re:When will you learn?! (Score:4, Insightful)
In a related analogy, you can't go from a sane and reasoning adult to believing this stuff in one day.
Take all the time you need to realize how reality works, because after you die your opinions won't matter much anyways.
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I think vaginatarianism is the best... (Score:3, Funny)
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Stop anthropomorphizing plants! (Score:5, Funny)
Plant selflessness and selfish genes (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the same reason hy such "nepotism" exists elsewhere in biology; there's no reason why one would expect plants to be any different, though I imagine the problem of recognizing your siblings is somewhat harder.
Link to Actual Paper (Score:4, Informative)
Roots - of all sorts. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/biology_lett
PETA? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:PETA? (Score:4, Funny)
"For every animal you don't eat, I'm going to eat three"
Oh, and the always popular:
"There is room for every one of god's creations...right next to the mashed potatoes."
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Re:PETA? (Score:5, Funny)
"If we aren't supposed to eat the animals, then why did God make them out of meat?"
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Re:PETA? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:PETA? (Score:5, Funny)
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Enter the rise of Vegetable Rights Activists! (Score:3, Funny)
Uh huh (Score:4, Funny)
Ya right. I suggest they stop smoking the plants they are studying.
Obligitory Zelazny Quote (Score:3, Funny)
--From somewhere in the original Amber Series
Cognition isn't the right concept (Score:4, Interesting)
The process of biochemically detecting neighboring organisms is not new. Bacteria use quorum sensing [wikipedia.org] biochemical pathways to "communicate" various things about environment such as population density -- molecules are exchanged and recognized in the extracellular environment.
What is interesting here is that presummably there are different signals for siblings and non-siblings. A more interesting result, in my opinion, would be to find the biochemical connection to this selective quorum sensing. The answer could be complicated : it could include libraries of biochemicals (in varying concentrations) and differences in bacterial flora between plants.
Drought Tolerance (Score:3, Interesting)
--
Rent solar power with no maintenance fee: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Psychological Altruism vs Evolutionary Altruism (Score:3, Informative)
Psychological altruism is performing behavior which requires for motivation only the benefit (however broadly you are to construe benefit) of a person other than the one performing the action. So, if I'm inclined to do something nice for you, even if I don't get anything out of it, then I am an altruistic person, and such nice things are altruistic behavior.
Evolutionary altruism is having heritable traits which increase the reproductive fitness of others without increasing the reproductive fitness of the individual who has that trait. Sterility is evolutionarily altruistic (in social animals at least), and yet clearly not psychologically altruistic (you don't choose what genes you're born with).
These plants are evolutionarily altruistic. They are not psychologically altruistic, because they have no psychological traits at all.
Re:Sentience (Score:5, Funny)
Well they asked the plants if they had cognition and memory, and the plants said "no". Then they asked if they meant they didn't have either or just didn't have both, and the plant said "both of what?" So there ya go.
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Re:Cognition and memory (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't to say that plants can't "remember" things, for instance, plant immune response to pathogens, injury, etc. They can habituate to hormones, chemicals, and so forth. It simply means that the "memory" and "learning" being done is low-order physiological homeostasis maintenance and not an insightful act. Intracellular messaging systems account for a lot of "emergent" behavior from these organisms, but it's a far jump from that up to something that can actively plan its actions before it does them.
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