Wait before your hear the harrowing laments of the rocks cracking in the cold.
/s
No, more seriously, stop giving an emotional meaning to a sound.
Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
111–120 of 188 posts
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like that line of thinking. But I still fail at giving a good explanation of that concept. Maybe it's intuitive for me due to having learned about cellular automata during my youth. I know I'm entering esoteric and new age territory but something tells me this can even be applied to phenomena like quantum entanglement. My idea is that if there is an information receivable and possibly even emittable by a biological…
The rule of thumb in evolutionary biology is if it has a cost and lasts through evolutionary time, it is beneficial. Because otherwise a similar organism that doesn't waste that time/energy on the useless thing/behavior will outcompete. Here's some odd and obvious examples. Religion has a cost (lots of resources and time are spent on them) and they have lasted through time, therefore it is evolutionarily beneficial.…
Unempathic people can make hard decisions; Such as choosing between spending a hospital budget on fuel for the generators, building upkeep, restocking, and employee wages –v.s. the life of one child.
A lot of people can't make such a decision.
I wouldn't want such people unchecked though.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without modern agriculture + nutrition, I don’t think you could survive without eating meat (if I’m wrong, feel free to ignore the rest of this). That means you have to murder an animal to live and don’t really get a choice in the matter. This why we are inherently murderous. Sure, these days we pay other people to do it, but when you pick up a burger; that cow was murdered — hopefully humanly.
Hmm. I don't agree that all killing is murder.
Certainly not. Some is merciful and – in the case of dignified deaths – by old and modern laws, totally consensual as well. Sometimes death is appropriate even if it’s not what was hoped for.
It’s not an easy distinction to make by any means, but it’s a distinction that humans have believed to exist for millennia at least.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think we’re all that murderous at all unless we’re subjected to acute, severe stresses and/or maladaptive processes (usually early in life). I genuinely care about the well being of other living things and would hate to be in a position where I felt murder was necessary. I know I’m not alone. Seeing how war affects soldiers, I suspect the experience of killing and witnessing death is typically very traumatic…
Without modern agriculture + nutrition, I don’t think you could survive without eating meat (if I’m wrong, feel free to ignore the rest of this). That means you have to murder an animal to live and don’t really get a choice in the matter. This why we are inherently murderous. Sure, these days we pay other people to do it, but when you pick up a burger; that cow was murdered — hopefully humanly.
People can live without eating animals (at least without seeking them out; getting small animals in your food is practically inevitable). However you’re right, it’s very difficult and impractical without modern agriculture. Apart from a good understanding of macros and vitamin B12, there’s not much else a vegan needs from modernity. B12 should be present in all foods too, but in modernity it’s simply too clean to get enough without supplementing. Even livestock are supplemented with it in feed lots where they aren’t exposed to much outdoor microbe-laden plant matter and water. I’m not sure how well a vegan would do if they just ate plants from a relatively “clean” field without washing the food too much; maybe they’d actually be just fine.
Bizarrely enough, even meat eaters can be somewhat low in B12 in the USA. It’s a vitamin that’s generally not in excess in a lot of diets, omnivore or otherwise.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#115I am astounded that no one has mentioned "The Sound Machine" by Roald Dahl (1949), in which a scientist invents a machine that makes ultrasonic sounds audible to humans. He discovers that plants scream when cut. You can read it at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...
That was a cool read. It took me on a long journey to find references to it... seems like there's actually some truth to it.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think we’re all that murderous at all unless we’re subjected to acute, severe stresses and/or maladaptive processes (usually early in life). I genuinely care about the well being of other living things and would hate to be in a position where I felt murder was necessary. I know I’m not alone. Seeing how war affects soldiers, I suspect the experience of killing and witnessing death is typically very traumatic…
I think our current culture is biased to feel weird about killing. Historically, killing was often a form of entertainment for the public, and a matter of course for getting the nutrients for life.
I agree that we’re biased to feel weird about it. But I think that’s for good reason. In a lot of modern cultures, the necessity of killing is less present all the time. In cultures or circumstances where it’s still essential for survival, I’d say go for it; there’s no sense in dying because Fred in Wisconsin feels good about eating lentils instead of beef, and you’re worried about being immoral by killing a goat. There are still moments of necessity where two lives can compete for survival.
We will all eventually be dust, but I believe there’s good reason to strive for the pre-dust period of existence to involve as little killing as practicable.
In situations where I can pick plants over animals I will every time. I have no real need to kill or pay for killing. It’s an incredible luxury that hasn’t been afforded to people until relatively recently in history though, and I don’t expect others to follow suit when they’re less fortunate or living with wildly different opportunities and resources.
So, overall I think the bias makes sense. At the same time, I won’t deny that killing to survive is a reality for many and will continue to be – I suspect you aren’t immoral or depraved if your situation demands killing to live.
But that’s all my insular little take on things and I know many (most?) disagree!
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#117That's nothing. Dutch plants tweet:
https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/dutch-tree-sends-tweets-ab...
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
By a trait being "beneficial" you mean that it prolongs the existence of some gene specifically, right? My understanding of evolution is that traits aren't necessarily beneficial to those who posses it in the colloquial sense. For example, animals that perish due to reproduction. Also, isn't saying a trait exists so it must be beneficial a bit of an over simplification? Couldn't a relatively useless trait hypothetica…
Yes, beneficial refers to those genes continuing on into the future. The operative descriptive word describing those "useless traits" is cost. If nothing else, they have a cost of the energy and resources required to produce the relevant cells or whatever. Another organism that does not waste that energy and resources will out-compete the one building the useless trait. Natural selection will make it go away.
Though that might just be the case for most things, I don't think it would be fair to say that for all things. Two traits could develop in conjunction with another, and trait 1 gives an advantage, while trait 2 is a disadvantage. The most in-your-face example I think is the stereotype of nerds and glasses. In short, a good enough trait could get you laid and fed even though you have a crappy trait that came with it.
edit: alternatively, a bad enough trait could completely derail the development of a good train. Maybe dolphins born with 200iq brains develop some other kind of bad trait as a result of the same mutation that doesn't allow for the 200iq trait to permeate.
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#119How about this claim: pieces of string when stressed emit sounds that are picked up by nearby strings. Should be investigate this claim? What does it mean that the world of string acts this way. For those that haven't witnessed it, I will describe a very easily constructed experiment to demonstrate this phenomena that I have discovered: first stretch a string tightly and then quickly flick it with your finger, stress…
Do you mean resonance? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_resonance
When I used to live in a small room, one day I put my guitar kind of half-way into my closet by the corner of the room. A few mins later I yelled something (I forget what) and it was as though my guitar strummed the A string on its own. It freaked me out for a sec but then I started belting different notes, and as soon as I got back to a certain note the guitar would strum itself again!
Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative
#120Informative here meaning that you can deduce something about a plant's condition from faint sounds emitted by it. It's not implying that the plants use those sounds for the purpose of transmitting information. From the article: "These results demonstrate the potential in studying plant bioacoustics, suggest that plant acoustic emissions may play an important role in ecology and evolution, and may have direct implicat…
> Informative here meaning that you can deduce something about a plant's condition from faint sounds emitted by it. It's not implying that the plants use those sounds for the purpose of transmitting information.
We already know that plants transmit information to each other through the air by emitting chemicals. It doesn't seem hugely significant whether or not they also do it by emitting sounds.