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Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

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131–140 of 188 posts

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there's a line of thinking that it's strange how many of our leaders are psychopaths. But for all we know, it's strange how few of our leaders are psychopaths relative to other cultures throughout history.

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#132
post #30

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. 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…

If you break a branch, the sound of it breaking informs you that you have broken a branch.

If a branch falls in the forest and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest#:~....

"... majority view of the quantum mechanics community then and arguably to this day is that existence in the absence of an observer is at best a conjecture"

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#133
post #30

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. 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.

In algculture setting, it is far easier to record sound than testing for chemical.

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The characteristic one for this in humans is sickle cell anemia. It really sucks for the people who have it but it sucks less than malaria, so it’s persisted in the gene pool… in regions with endemic malaria.

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#136
post #87

Didn't the founder of scientology claim plants scream when they are in pain and even "invented" a machine to measure their pain? I wonder how they interpret this finding.

The Lex Fridman podcast[1] with Aaron Smith-Levin, a former scientology insider (who grew out of it), made me believe that Scientology has been overly vilified, most likely because it threatens power of specific people, just what the scientologists claim.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1lN9zkK_k0

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#137
post #90

I 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...

I think the BFG could also hear the screams of trees as they were being chopped down.

Sources online agree with you.

> The BFG could hear the tread of a ladybird's footsteps as she walks across a leaf, the whispering of ants as they carry around in the soil talking to one another, and the sudden shrill cry of pain a tree gives out when a woodman cuts into it with an axe.

https://www.icsestudyguide.com/2020/10/class-5-english-liter...

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#138
post #29
post #18

Does this throw out the whole moral panic about animal welfare? If plants suffer too, isn't it wrong to eat them as well? Or there should be real focus in humane treatment and harvesting them?

> panic None of those concerns are new. Jainism is at least three millennia old.

Also, strict Jains are only supposed to eat anything other than fruit that has fallen from the tree, taking into account the suffering of plants as living beings.

Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#139
post #75

How 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 strings grow on their own and sexually reproduce, though?

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Re: Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative

#140
post #18

Does this throw out the whole moral panic about animal welfare? If plants suffer too, isn't it wrong to eat them as well? Or there should be real focus in humane treatment and harvesting them?

> Does this throw out the whole moral panic about animal welfare? Whether or not plants suffer has no bearing on whether we should cause animals to suffer. Animal agriculture requires the use of more plants as animal feed than eating plants directly, so even if plants feel pain, we'd cause less harm by eating them than eating animals. > If plants suffer too, isn't it wrong to eat them as well? This says nothing about…

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