The Light Eaters

Description

Highlights

Chapter 2: How Science Changes Its Mind

Great Lakes–area people

plants are the world’s “second brothers,” created just after the “elder brother” forces of wind, rocks, rain, snow, and thunder. Plants are dependent on those elder brothers for their life, while supporting all life created after plants. Nonhuman animals are “third brothers,” reliant both on the elements and on plants. Humanity is the “youngest brother,” the most recently created of all the beings. Humans alone need all three of the other brothers to survive at all.

Love this geological timescale of evolution poetically said

Theophrastus

“It is by the help of the better known that we must pursue the unknown, and better known are the things larger and plainer to our senses

Glutamate and glycine, two of the most common neurotransmitters in animal brains, are present in plants also, and seem to be crucial to how they pass information through their stems and leaves

They have been found to form, store, and access memories, sense incredibly subtle changes in their environment, and send highly sophisticated chemicals aloft on the air in response

Chapter 4: Alive to Feeling

In some schools of thought, the presence of consciousness is evident mainly in its inverse—by the ability to be knocked unconscious.

Plants can be knocked unconscious!

Within thirty minutes of being touched, 10 percent of the plant’s genome was altered.

The ions that caused action potentials in plants weren’t the same as the ones in animal nerves, and the proteins that regulate them weren’t the same either. But still, Van Volkenburgh thought, “you have to wonder if they have nervelike functions.”

Trewavas

publishing papers and books laying out scientific arguments in favor of plant intelligence and consciousness.

Chapter 5: An Ear to the Ground

In the first set of experiments, one tray contained a few teaspoons of water, and the other was empty. It’s a well-observed fact that plant roots can detect “moisture gradients” in soil, allowing them to find water in close range, and as expected, nearly every pea shoot grew roots toward the water tray.

Next

instead of water freely available in a tray, she pumped water through a sealed plastic pipe near the base of one of the legs of the Y, while the other Y-leg remained above an empty tray

nearly every pea plant grew its roots toward the sound of the running water

Next

they were given the choice between the tray of water and the water flowing in the sealed pipe

In this case, they chose the open water, suggesting the plants prioritized actual moisture

They can hear and CHOOSE

Chapter 6: The (Plant) Body Keeps the Score

We couldn’t be more biologically different. And yet their patterns and rhythms have certain resonances with our own. Plants have internal circadian clocks like we do; they need the cycle of day and night. They slow down in the winter and speed up in the spring. They move through youth and old age. And they maintain a record of what they’ve been through. Memory clearly has deep roots in biology. This makes sense; if the trajectory of all evolution is toward survival, then the ability to remember has a natural evolutionary advantage. It’s incredibly useful for staying alive.

Through meditation. I've touched on my inner spark of consciousness. And it is a simple but fundamental part of my self. But it isnts my thoughts, feelings, sensations, feeling tones, or anything else . It is simpler and more fundamental. And because it is the centre around which everything else evolves. I think one doesn't need intelligence or feelings or feeling tones to be conscious. It is simply the awareness of I. For this reason i think that consciousness is the seed that grows intelligence. I think evolutionarily consciousness comes first and intelligence follows. And for this reason. Even before reading this book. I think plants are conscious.

Roger Hangarter, a biology professor at Indiana University, maintains “Plants in Motion,” an endearing online library of plant movement videos in the style of the early internet

But the best plant videos on the internet are of the dodder vine,

https://plantsinmotion.bio.indiana.edu/index.html

Chapter 8: The Scientist and the Chameleon Vine

Baluška says absolutely. “I think consciousness is a very basic phenomenon which started with the first cell,” he says.

I agree

I think the plants are primary organisms, and we are the secondary ones. We are fully dependent on them. Without them, we would not be able to survive,” Baluška says. “The opposite situation would not be so drastic for them.”

Boquila

can evidently adapt to whatever sort of plant the environment throws at it, and doesn’t seem to require physical contact at all. It is sensing neighboring plants in real time and morphing its body to match them—sometimes transforming its leaves to match the foliage of multiple different trees at once, without touching any of them.

Plants see each other by the color of the light,” Dudley said. Light changes color when it passes through a plant, and the light that passes through different plants is altered each in a different way, far too subtle for us to notice but clearly distinct enough for plants to notice. Plants take note of the quality of light falling on them, and whether that light has passed through a plant before reaching them,

They then grow their stems to certain lengths accordingly—taller when there are lots of neighbors around, and shorter when there are not

To me this is enough to prove consciousness. The plant is aware of itself as distinct from others. If others are around and change the light it alters itself

Phytocrome-mediated stem extension” is the official term for this behavior

plants had a similar belowground awareness: they knew which roots were their own, and which belonged to other plants, and would adjust their root growth accordingly

aboveground, they got taller; if they knew they had neighbors belowground, they made more roots,”

Dudley was right. When surrounded by unrelated plants, searocket would grow roots prolifically, aggressively expanding into the sandy soil in an attempt to monopolize nearby nutrients. But when they grew beside their kin, they would politely confine their roots, leaving siblings space to make a living beside them

When impatiens grew with strangers, they would frondesce as aggressively as possible, unfurling extravagantly to coopt as much of the sunlit space as they could. When

planted beside kin, they would kindly arrange their leaves to avoid shading their siblings.

This shows spacial awareess and being able to, in some way, put themselves in the shoes of the other plant.

Hamilton’s rule states that you will behave preferentially toward your family members, so long as the cost to your own well-being doesn’t exceed the benefit to your shared genetic line.

This also means that a willingness to help family exists on a sliding scale according to your degree of relatedness. Or, as British biologist J. B. S. Haldane was rumored to have declared, “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.”

In the case of the arabidopsis, the way a plant notices that its sibling is beneath it is by sensing the quality of light reflected back.

The implication of kin recognition is that plants have a social life. They are aware of who they are in the company of, and decide how to behave toward them accordingly

Much like

A diverse mix of half siblings seemed to work better than a monoculture of identical plants; it’s unclear why.

This feel like plants manipulating us to get what the want. To spend their lives surrounded by their own family. But not clones of themselves because that would be boring!

how sunflower yields went up when relatives were planted together, cultures of closely related rice had more energy available to focus on rice making

Chapter 10: Inheritance

the more these “lung cancer gene” people smoked, the more likely they were to get lung cancer

People with the lung cancer gene

who ate a significant amount of cruciferous vegetables,

appeared to have a lower risk of lung cancer proportional to how much broccoli they ate. At high enough intake, broccoli nearly erased

This is likely because cruciferous vegetables like broccoli produce compounds that, when broken down in our

Chapter 11: Plant Futures

At the end of the day, whether or not plants are intelligent is a social question, not a scientific one. Science will continue to find that plants are doing more than we’d imagined. But then the rest of us will have to look at the data and come to our own conclusions

Court, but the court rejected it in 1972 on the basis that the Sierra Club did not have standing: they would not personally be injured by the resort in any way

I cant help but think that this could have been argued as a future people problem. If these ecologies were harmed so would future people by the loss of them . By the loss of fresh air water and everything else, like pollinator habitats, which a necessary to grow food.

But plant personhood itself is a concept as old as human culture. As we’ve already learned, Native philosophies from

all corners of the globe often understand plants as relatives, or ancestors, or otherwise persons in their own right. It’s not that plants are human, but that humans are just one kind of person, as are animals

I've long thought this too. I didn't know it was such a controversial topic

Plant Consciousness is real and comes before intelligence