![]() After all, scientists live in the world of unconfirmed hypotheses-that’s their job. Gagliano, for her part, is fine with swimming against the current. So I see this as, these are basically romantics.” But now, once that’s established, there’s this new romantic school of thought, that not only do they respond to their environment but they do it consciously. ![]() ![]() “We discovered decades ago that plants have signal transduction mechanisms that allow them to sense the environment. There are some potential problems with the methods of the study itself, but Taiz also thinks this is just another case of anthropomorphizing plants. “Since plants lack neurons, this seems quite a stretch, so right off the bat, I’m very skeptical.” For Lincoln Taiz, the whole concept doesn’t yet pass the smell test. For one thing, nobody has an explanation for how, on a molecular level, plants could store, recall, and act upon memories the way they would need to, in order to learn. There’s good reason to be skeptical of the evidence though. Not everyone is so convinced, of course, but Gagliano says the evidence is all there, scientists just don’t want to use the word learning in relation to plants. See " Can Plants Learn to Associate Stimuli With Reward?" If this was a bee, or an animal of any kind, it would be no doubt that this was considered learning.” If you want to get into the details of this experiment, I wrote about it for The Scientist, and we’ll put a link to that story in the episode description.īut according to Gagliano, the results of this experiment are clear. Gagliano and some colleagues recreated Pavlov’s famous experiment in associative learning-that’s the one where a dog learns to associate a treat with a bell-but they did it using plants. Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia, generated evidence that plants can learn. But still, the comparison between all of that and the nervous systems of animals just really doesn’t sit right with some people.Īnd recently, there’s been a new source of contention. In defense of the neurobiology crowd, plants do generate electrical charge using ion channels as part of their elaborate system of internal signaling. If you ask the skeptics, plant neurobiology is a case of overzealous personification. It made it hard to communicate.Ī few hundred years later, we’ve settled that dispute, but scientists still argue about how to appropriately compare plants to animals. And that muddied the water around the actual biology. This was not helpful really, to treat the flower in an anthropomorphic way.”īotanists of the day kept using words we typically associate with people to talk about plants. Just the use of the term husbands and wives to describe flowers created part of the backlash because they were personifying sex in plants. personifying stamens and pistils as if they were husbands and wives. He wrote a book called The Loves of the Plants, which was an epic poem. “One of the biggest proponents of this idea was Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather. And they said, well, if plants have sex, they must experience passion and lust. Some of the proponents of the sexual theory went way overboard. Well, the field was divided between the sexualists and the asexualists. “At first the research on this question was very objective, applying the scientific method. It took us a long time to get here, though. Nowadays no one disputes that this falls under the biological category of sexual reproduction, and we even use words like male and female when talking about flowers. people were so biased against the idea that there was sex going on in a flower.”įor anybody not familiar with plant sex, flowers produce pollen and eggs, and the two have to come together for plants to reproduce. “It was fought over, and there was huge controversies for another hundred and fifty years. To call plant reproduction sex at the time though, or to make any comparison between the way plants reproduce and the way humans do, was extremely controversial. He’s also an expert on an older semantic dispute, one that arose in the late 17 th century when botanists had just discovered that plants reproduce sexually. Lincoln Taiz is a retired professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he’s been a vocal skeptic of plant neurobiologists. “My interpretation of this whole business with plant consciousness is it’s sort of a replay of what went on during the discovery of sex in plants.” Which is actually a very old problem for the scientific community. ![]() A lot of other biologists thought their colleagues were going overboard, and an argument ensued over how to talk about the science at hand.
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