Detective_Thorn writes:
"Plants are also able to make complex decisions. At least this is what scientists from the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the University of Gottingen have concluded from their investigations on Barberry (Berberis vulgaris), which is able to abort its own seeds to prevent parasite infestation. The results are the first ecological evidence of complex behaviour in plants. They indicate that this species has a structural memory, is able to differentiate between inner and outer conditions as well as anticipate future risks, scientists write in the renowned journal American Naturalist, the premier peer-reviewed American journal for theoretical ecology.
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Are Plants More Intelligent Than We Assumed?
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(Score: 3, Informative) by xlefay on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:12AM
... Not really, No.
(Score: 4, Funny) by EvilJim on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:18AM
The same answer works if you replace 'plants' with 'people'
(Score: 4, Funny) by EvilJim on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:20AM
Actually, the Barberry does sounds smarter than a lot of people from reading TFS
(Score: 0) by bro1 on Thursday March 06 2014, @07:59AM
http://www.satirewire.com/news/april02/rice.shtml [satirewire.com] People are smarter than plants!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:13AM
No?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by glyph on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:08AM
Surely this complex behaviour is more easily explained by normal evolutionary processes. I mean, how does the seed know to germinate in spring? Does innate intelligence and structural memory allow them to anticipate the best season? Must be.
(Score: 5, Informative) by umafuckitt on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:18AM
These people [plantbehavior.org] think that plant intelligence is under-rated.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:28PM
And I think the intelligence of some unicellular creatures is underrated. Many people assume that you need brains to think. But there are some unicellular creatures that build quite sophisticated shells for themselves[1] - and some won't even reproduce despite having enough food, unless they have enough shell material for the daughter cell:
http://biostor.org/reference/7123 [biostor.org]
After withholding material for a whie:
(full text here: https://archive.org/stream/biologicalbullet70mari/ biologicalbullet70mari_djvu.txt [archive.org])
See also: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24444111 [nih.gov]
OK maybe it's "instinct" but do we really understand such creatures enough to be sure they are as stupid as most of us think they are?
They may not be as smart as us, but many multicellular animals don't seem that smart either. And how smart can you behave if you have limited senses and abilities? What if intelligence isn't only due to networks of neurons but the neurons themselves are significantly intelligent? If you are a smart single celled creature and you needed to control a huge multicellular body you'd need to work together with other like-minded single celled creatures- for redundancy and just for making the necessary "connections" (can't hook up to muscles by yourself).
[1] in comparison hermit crabs don't even build their own "home" shells ( but allegedly some have an interesting "protocol" for swapping shells: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vacancy- hermit-crab-social-networks/ [scientificamerican.com] ).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheLink on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:37PM
Oops forgot the clarification - many testate amoeba species have distinctive shells! It's not just random arrangement of stuff.- amoebae/ [bogology.org]e -amoebae [google.com]
http://bogology.org/what-we-do/in-the-lab/testate
https://sites.google.com/site/hegerthierry/testat
http://www.arcella.nl/nebela-clades [arcella.nl]
http://www.arcella.nl/lesquereusia-spiralis [arcella.nl]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:19AM
It's an interesting conundrum. Even if it's "merely" some Rube Goldberg biochemical contraption that causes this particular behavior in this particular instance, and even if it arose through random means or as an accidental byproduct of some entirely unrelated mechanism...well, the plant's still making the smartest choice, no?
And how is any of that fundamentally different from the origins and functions of our own brains, save for the versatility of our generalized decision-making apparatus?
If you'd conclude that passing the Turing Test is all that it takes to qualify as being intelligent, regardless of the method used to pass the test...then, yeah; this qualifies as a form of intelligence.
It really comes down to a question of philosophical purity or empirical evidence. If you define intelligence based on some arbitrary definition of how the decision-making process is supposed to work, then no. But if you define intelligence as the ability to make intelligent decisions by whatever means, then the fact that that's what this plant is doing answers the question in the affirmative.
I'll harken back to Dijkstra: The question of whether machines (or plants!) can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dast on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:43AM
This this this this a million times over.
Even better: what happens if we find out the planet behaves the same way? Structured decision and memory exhibited by Earth itself? Maybe global warming is gaia having a fevor in response to an infection (trolls on That Old Site)? What if the cosmos exhibits the same behavior?
Please excuse me while I go pull some classic Asimov off my shelf.
(Score: 2) by Daniel Dvorkin on Wednesday March 05 2014, @06:16AM
The answer, of course, is to define anything not done by human beings as "not intelligent." This may not be a particularly rational definition, but it's remarkably durable.
Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
(Score: 1) by krishnoid on Wednesday March 05 2014, @08:01AM
I'll harken back to Dijkstra: ... as the question of whether submarines can swim.
So, what's the answer? Don't leave us hanging!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday March 05 2014, @12:47PM
"But if you define intelligence as the ability to make intelligent decisions by whatever means"
The problem is I read the paper when it came out like a week ago (before it got journalized five times over and eventually ended up here) and what they're anthropomorphizing as Einstein level intelligence is only slighly smarter than an acid base buffer system or maybe insulin hormone.
So say you mix some acetic acid (vinegar) and some sodium acetate and then fool around with dumping various acid / base into it, and this chemical solution is so blindingly intelligent, so thoughtful, that those atoms are solving division problems and logarithms and they know all about the (Henderson?) equation and Lewis acids and bases and they're just so darn smart its unbelievable, they know more chemistry today than I can remember from decades ago so that chemical solution is obviously far more intelligent than myself. Actually, no, the atoms aren't intelligent and nothing is thinking, its just a creative hack on what weak acid/base does when you mix it with a conjugate salt, more or less, where the salt "fakes out" whatever else is added by contributing a metric crapton (scientific term) of the anion to keep the party running. Or something along those lines.
You can tell I did quant and ochem and not biochem many years ago. I think the acid/base buffer in your blood somehow involves carbonate and dissolved CO2 aka carbonic acid or some such thing. The chemical buffer system in your blood is why holding your breath or hyperventilating doesn't usually kill you, or drinking a simple glass of lemonade doesn't cause instant collapse, etc.
The meta story is most people don't know you can do some pretty complicated analog calculations using pretty dumb analog computation methods. How did Honeywell make bimetallic mercury wetted thermostats for like a century before Nest came along? Must be magic! Maybe bimetallic thermostats are thinking, thinking real hard about coefficients of expansion and spiral equations and division problems. Oh those bimetallic strips; I hope they never rise up like skynet and take over using their megamind intelligence.
(Score: 5, Funny) by TheloniousToady on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:23AM
Most plants I know are as dumb as a stump.
(Score: 5, Funny) by gringer on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:47AM
Have you ever seen a stump recover after being cut completely down? Those bastards are cunning. The only way to get rid of them is to pull them out by the roots, and that takes weeks of hard, back-breaking labour, even for a stump that's been around a little less time than you have.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by TheloniousToady on Wednesday March 05 2014, @12:38PM
Good point. Now that you mention it, mulberry trees are near-geniuses in that regard.
(Score: 2, Informative) by NewMexicoArt on Wednesday March 05 2014, @05:49AM
i seem to remember from some time ago hearing about testing showing plants responding to peoples thoughts. maybe they need to use some kind of double blind testing to assure that the plants here are not responding to the researchers thoughts.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Skarjak on Wednesday March 05 2014, @06:07AM
I'm starting to think we should have a bot that automatically posts "Betteridge's law of headlines says no." to every submission ending in a question mark.
(Score: 3, Funny) by acid andy on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:13PM
We can easily settle whether to have that bot or not by posting an open discussion on Soylent entitled "Does Betteridge's Law of Headlines Apply to this Headline?".
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by neagix on Wednesday March 05 2014, @08:24AM
my BS meter broke the glass
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:03PM
What will the vegans eat now?!?
(Score: 1) by Hartree on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:44PM
They'll take the next step to Breatharianism, of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breatharian [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:05PM
Let them eat vegans
(Score: 2) by Boxzy on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:43PM
I'm certain sure my vegetarian friends will embrace this news with open arms!
Go green, Go Soylent.