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Comment by thinkling

6 months ago

If you find this interesting, I strongly recommend the book _The Light Eaters_ by Zoë Schlanger [0]. She discusses this finding as well as other sense-abilities of plants. Recent science has found pretty amazing things.

If I recall correctly: flowers are often shaped like dish antennas to collect sound vibration, and plants can distinguish the frequency of wing beats of their preferred pollinator from frequencies of other insects, and will act only for their pollinators.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Light-Eaters-Unseen-Intelligence-Unde...

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thinkling

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marojejian  6 months ago

I listened to that book and enjoyed it. But that said, I'm torn between friendliness to the general concept, and skepticism based in part on the bias of proponents to deeply desire plants to display something like intelligence (a bias I share).

For example the most amazing claims in the book were around the ability of Boquila trifoliolata to dynamically mimic other plants.

see this old HN thread: https://press.asimov.com/articles/plant-vision

  • igorbark  6 months ago

    i definitely agree that it would've been nice to have images in the book as it was hard to get a sense of exactly how well Boquila was mimicking neighbouring plants!

    but in reference to the linked article, i will say that the researchers interviewed in the book (and i got that sense for Zoe as well) were in agreement with you that the research didn't support a vision-based mechanism. but everyone agrees that the imitation is going on. the researchers in the book suggest a gene transfer-based mechanism instead! (mentioned briefly in your linked article)

  • 90s_dev  6 months ago

    [flagged]

    • tomhow  6 months ago

      You seem to be on some campaign against atheists today, which needs to stop now. It breaks multiple guidelines and destroys what HN is for. It's great to ponder the big existential questions; I do plenty of it myself. But when discussing these topics here we need to find a way to do so without being derisive towards others.

      2 replies →

    • myrmidon  6 months ago

      Do you think that if we simulated a bee, molecule for molecule, that this simulation would behave differently from the real thing because the simulation fails to replicate its soul?

      What kind of behaviors in animals/humans does this soul affect? How do you believe does it interface with nervous systems in general?

      1 reply →