(January 31, 2014 at 2:04 pm)Raeven Wrote: Ut-oh.
The Intelligent Plant
You do realise there are 12 pages to the article? On the second page the author writes regarding the scientists working on plant signalling that...
"No one I spoke to in the loose, interdisciplinary group of scientists working on plant intelligence claims that plants have telekinetic powers or feel emotions." (emphasis added)
Now, lets look at one of the best pieces of evidence that the author presents. I would say this is the example of a Mimosa plant, which rapidly move their leaves in response to touch.
The experiment the author describes consists of dropping the mimosa 15cm, movement which causes the plant to retract its leaves. However, when one drops the plant a number of times it "learns" that it does not need to retract its leaves and so stops. This type of learning is in fact just habituation, and can be encoded by a simple long-term negative feedback mechanism leading to de-sensitisation. It in no way implies perception.
Associative learning is the real marker of the beginnings of intelligence. For that the plant would have to associate a neutral stimuli (say a smell or Light/dark) with a positive or negative reward. If the plant could then move its leaves to this neutral stimuli then one could say it had learned something and is not just de-sensitising. AND EVEN THEN, just because they can do that does not mean they have episodic memory and are able to integrate the what, where and when of experiences, which is a key marker of consciousness. The case in point would be Drosophila, which despite there ability to learn associatively they do not have episodic memory.
Anyway, the idea of plants being able to perceive pain is so nonsensical it even has it's own page debunking the idea in Skepdic.com
If you are going to post evidence in support of a theory, then you should really try to find primary evidence, or at the very least the opinion of an agreed authority.
