Post by makoto on Aug 5, 2013 0:07:59 GMT
My wife gave me this book on Father's Day!
She noticed a small line-drawing of a VF trap in this 177 page book. This is a small 6x8 paperback, some line-drawings, no photos, nothing flashy. I started to read a few pages.... very intriguing.
This book tells what plants are seeing, smelling, hearing, and sensing (physical touch). Unlike a hugely popular book "The Secret Life of Plants (1973)" which Chamovitz severely criticizes because of its unsupported, unscientific claims about the plants, "What a Plant Knows" approaches the subject of "senses" of the plant (what a plant knows) from a solid scientific angle, citing various research in the field of genetics and molecular biology. This is a book for a general public, but I am certainly not qualified to make any critical comment on the subject. You must read it yourself if you are so inclined. I enjoyed it very much.
An interesting footnote about this book is that I just received a latest CP Newsletter from the Insectivorous Plant Society (IPS), Japan. In the literature Review section I was pleasantly surprised to find this book, apparently translated into Japanese in 2013, and picked up by the editorial staff of IPS for inclusion.
I took many pictures of CPs over the years, but every time I look at this one photo of a small spider trapped on a D. rotundifolia leaf, I always think about what the sundew is "thinking" - or "what it knows" for that matter. The plant is thinking - a scary notion belonging to an SF movie. A small spider is quietly sitting in the middle of the leaf blade, and the tentacles are not bent yet.... but soon they will be, to assimilate the prey. Just imagine you are trapped in that manner, and it's not a sundew but a huge monster octopus with deadly tentacles. Just to make a closer analogy, this octopus emerged from the dark, deep bottom of the ocean, so it does not have any eyes (like sundews). It only relies on physical senses! Do you think you are better off with sundews, if I gave you a pick, simply because the plant does not have any brain?
We all agree that plants do not possess brains as we animals do. But what is a brain anyway? It is a centralized organ responsible for various decision-making. We receive external inputs from our environment and respond to these stimulations, mostly via decisions made in our brain. Just like "What a Plant Knows" points out so clearly, a plant senses external stimuli - be that light, smell, sound, heat, physical touch - and responds, just like animals do. True, a plant does not have eyes, noses, ears or fingers, but their sensors are scattered all over the plant. And true, a plant does not have a centralized brain to process inputs, the decision-making process is distributed throughout the plant's body, and I dare say very well organized and synchronized (just like the distributed process paradigm in our PC world).
As the book points out, this input-response mechanism is a general behavior common throughout the plant kingdom, but the manifestation is particularly so clear in our beloved CPs. So, Chamovitz chose to include VF along with Mimosa in his discussion.
When we talk about plants seeing things around them, at the very basic level, the plant and the animal photoreceptors are very similar, "consisting of proteins connected to a chemical dye that absorbs the light." From an evolutionary perspective, the basic photoreceptor both plants and animals use developed billions of years ago, before the animal and the plant kingdom diverged into separate paths.
Makoto
She noticed a small line-drawing of a VF trap in this 177 page book. This is a small 6x8 paperback, some line-drawings, no photos, nothing flashy. I started to read a few pages.... very intriguing.
This book tells what plants are seeing, smelling, hearing, and sensing (physical touch). Unlike a hugely popular book "The Secret Life of Plants (1973)" which Chamovitz severely criticizes because of its unsupported, unscientific claims about the plants, "What a Plant Knows" approaches the subject of "senses" of the plant (what a plant knows) from a solid scientific angle, citing various research in the field of genetics and molecular biology. This is a book for a general public, but I am certainly not qualified to make any critical comment on the subject. You must read it yourself if you are so inclined. I enjoyed it very much.
An interesting footnote about this book is that I just received a latest CP Newsletter from the Insectivorous Plant Society (IPS), Japan. In the literature Review section I was pleasantly surprised to find this book, apparently translated into Japanese in 2013, and picked up by the editorial staff of IPS for inclusion.
I took many pictures of CPs over the years, but every time I look at this one photo of a small spider trapped on a D. rotundifolia leaf, I always think about what the sundew is "thinking" - or "what it knows" for that matter. The plant is thinking - a scary notion belonging to an SF movie. A small spider is quietly sitting in the middle of the leaf blade, and the tentacles are not bent yet.... but soon they will be, to assimilate the prey. Just imagine you are trapped in that manner, and it's not a sundew but a huge monster octopus with deadly tentacles. Just to make a closer analogy, this octopus emerged from the dark, deep bottom of the ocean, so it does not have any eyes (like sundews). It only relies on physical senses! Do you think you are better off with sundews, if I gave you a pick, simply because the plant does not have any brain?
We all agree that plants do not possess brains as we animals do. But what is a brain anyway? It is a centralized organ responsible for various decision-making. We receive external inputs from our environment and respond to these stimulations, mostly via decisions made in our brain. Just like "What a Plant Knows" points out so clearly, a plant senses external stimuli - be that light, smell, sound, heat, physical touch - and responds, just like animals do. True, a plant does not have eyes, noses, ears or fingers, but their sensors are scattered all over the plant. And true, a plant does not have a centralized brain to process inputs, the decision-making process is distributed throughout the plant's body, and I dare say very well organized and synchronized (just like the distributed process paradigm in our PC world).
As the book points out, this input-response mechanism is a general behavior common throughout the plant kingdom, but the manifestation is particularly so clear in our beloved CPs. So, Chamovitz chose to include VF along with Mimosa in his discussion.
When we talk about plants seeing things around them, at the very basic level, the plant and the animal photoreceptors are very similar, "consisting of proteins connected to a chemical dye that absorbs the light." From an evolutionary perspective, the basic photoreceptor both plants and animals use developed billions of years ago, before the animal and the plant kingdom diverged into separate paths.
Makoto
