It's abacuses all the way down.
Careful observers have decoded the honeybee's waggle dance. It's a vector message. The dancer is telling her hivemates about a good source of honey. She repeatedly forms a figure-8 pattern, with the message in the middle.

The direction of the dance is relative to the main honeycomb wall of the hive. The angle between the central motion line and the wall represents the vector of the food source relative to the sun.

Transposing the viewed dance to a position on the bee's internal compass is complex, but using the memorized template can be hardwired in an insect with compound eyes that cover most of the compass. The template is assigned to one radial set of lenses, and the bee keeps the sun centered on that group of lenses.

The distance component of the vector is conveyed by the number of waggles in each central run.

This reminds me of the glial abacus that keeps track of numbers in short-term memory. Astrocyte cells serve as a kind of scorecard or abacus outside of the neurons. The neurons click up the astrocytes, and when the number of raised beads reaches a threshold the neurons tell the body to stop swimming or flying.

Let's try to imagine how this feels to a forager bee watching the dance.

Polistra has a hive near the mill...



Looking downward inside the hive we see one scout telling one forager about her find:

The forager observes the direction of the dance with respect to the hive, and forms a template for where the sun should be when she's flying.

Taking the important part in slow motion:



Each waggle ticks up the beads of her astrocyte abacus. For a simple animation we'll assume she's a Babylon Bee who counts in base 60. For each of these five waggles she brings in one 12-bead astrocyte. The total of all the counters tells her how many wingflaps she needs. (Obviously the real multiple of wingflaps per waggle would be far more than 12.)

She then launches out of the hive and turns until the actual sun matches the template position supplied by the dance. As she flies, each wingflap clicks down a bead. When the astrocytes have all reached threshold, she's there.




= = = = =


Even better: The clover is also an abacus!



What looks like a blossom is actually a cluster (inflorescence) of a few dozen tiny florets. Each 'spike' is a complete little flower, with a green cup (calyx) containing a white crown (corolla).

Why are some pointing down? Those are the florets that have already been touched by a pollinating insect. The clover detects the touch and removes nutrition from that floret, allowing it to drop down and turn brown.

Labels: bee, Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 3:41 PM

  The usual statcounter frustration
One perpetual puzzle about blogging: When I make a positive reference to some location or city, I rarely see any readers in that city reading the item about their city. Nobody is looking for positive words about their own place.

But often I see readers in that city looking at SOMETHING ELSE, which is frustrating. Hey! I just finished saying really good stuff about you! Why don't you want to see good stuff about you?

Recently I praised a literally heavenly singing group based in Chennai, in the Tamil part of India.



Today a reader in Chennai showed up. Are they looking at the item about Chennai? Nope, they're just part of a clickfarm. I've seen this 'are we smarter' item many times as a target of recognizable bots.

Win 10 + latest Chrome + obscure location = clickfarm.

Unlike most of my clickfarm favorites, this one isn't entirely trivial and stupid, but it's only interesting in the specialized realm of plant intelligence. It has no connection with India or current affairs.

Labels: Smarty-plants

  ¶ 12:05 AM

  Luck and chance aren't the same
Still meandering about purpose and design....

The usual ID argument about randomness doesn't quite hit one important point.

Luck and chance are not the same thing.

Every object, living or non-living, is battered by the chance events of weather. Every human is battered by the effectively random events of crazy or sane governments. Once in the life of a nation we get lucky with a Harding or FDR. Mostly we get holocaustal demons.

Inanimate objects can't respond to chance by ANTICIPATION. When a wind gust blows a pebble around, the pebble can't see it coming and take cover.

Living things ANTICIPATE the pattern of random events. Plants learn a pattern of light and dark or prevailing winds, and bend to meet the opportunity before it happens. We feel a storm coming, or feel a quake coming, and take appropriate steps.

On a higher level, humans can ANTICIPATE more complex opportunities. We can see that traffic is thinning out, so we get ready to jump in. We can see that Prohibition is likely to end, so we start converting our factory from cars to beer. We can see that jobs are starting to appear in the neighboring town, so we move there to be ready. We don't KNOW when the slot between cars will happen, and we don't KNOW when the 18th amendment will be repealed, and we don't KNOW that a job for our skill will appear, but we ANTICIPATE and make our own luck.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 9:00 AM

  Darwin and Pertz and Quages
Francis Darwin and Dorothea Pertz did a followup paper in 1903, reproducing the original results and musing on the meaning of the results.

It is often said that periodic phenomena are due to aftereffect. But this, though true in a certain sense, is too vague a statement to be called an explanation. It is known that geotropic and heliotropic curvatures continue long after the stimulus has ceased to act. So that it might at first appear as if the curvatures in one direction were the aftereffect of a given half hour's stimulus, and the opposite curvatures were the effect of the next ensuing half hour. But we are unable to construct a scheme of this sort which fits the facts. The aftereffect in a curving shoot which has been stimulated for half an hour lasts a long time, and we cannot see how the series of opposite curvatures, each lasting half an hour, could be caused by the combination of such aftereffects.

Aftereffect in the ordinary sense is the result of the last stimulus received, and we know of nothing to make us believe that the latent aftereffect of an antecedent and opposite stimulus can be held to account for the sharp reversal of curvature which we find to occur.

Humans have feature detectors, which also generate aftereffects, for simple stimuli AND for repetitions and curves and vibrations. In other words we have first derivative detectors (because all senses are deltas) and second derivative detectors for sinusoid patterns. These vibration aftereffects are instantly familiar to people who were born after 1910, because we have experience with vibrating machines and fast-moving visual inputs.

Right now I'm running laundry. I went into the laundry room a moment ago to turn off the crappy front-load washer before it ran wild. (The crappy machine doesn't have its own off-balance stop switch.) I always hold onto the knob, feeling and listening to the spin, then turn off the knob FAST when it starts to get overly noisy. Now my arm is still sensing a vibration aftereffect. If I had leaned my body against the washer, the whole body would be vibrating.

We also experience fast-moving scenery in a car, and see scenery moving the other way when we close our eyes. Similarly with a fast scroll on the computer screen, or a vibrating image on the screen.

All of these aftereffects serve as one side of a null-detector balance, to detect when the incoming pattern stops doing what it has been doing. In other words, the balance is one more layer of derivative. At all levels in all senses, we need to know what's new and what's old.

Francis understood the balance perfectly and beautifully: What we do at a particular juncture depends on the nature of our previous experiences and actions. The “self” which seems to be spontaneous is the balance which weighs conflicting influences. But he didn't have experience with the higher derivatives.

These higher derivative aftereffects were much less familiar in 1903. Nothing in a house vibrated. Trains would have provided the scenery effect, but riding in a train wasn't nearly as common as riding in cars now.

From the viewpoint of modern human experience, the conclusion is obvious. Plants also have higher derivative feature detectors.

The detector for changing sunlight makes sense. The earth doesn't rotate every 15 minutes, but the available sunlight in a forest does change on a similar time scale. As the sun passes over a series of trees, the plant would learn to bend back and forth to grab the maximum light. Pattern memory would allow the plant to anticipate the next increase, and bend into the light before it arrives. When the sun gets near the horizon the pattern would stop, and the off-null balance between input and aftereffect would tell the plant to prepare for darkness.

Gravity sensing can't be explained that way. Land doesn't rock back and forth routinely, so there's no reason to learn or adapt. BUT: a plant floating on water does rock back and forth periodically. Did land plants start out on floating islands before they settled on stable land?



Did they build floating islands, which then docked on the rocky shore to start spreading soil?

Later thought after watching the animation: Anticipatory plants, working together, could actually stabilize a floating island. Humans use this trick in wave-damping ships and quake-damping skyscrapers.

Labels: Equipoise, meta-equipoise, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 4:41 AM

  More
More SCIENCE DENIALISM and HORRIBLE CREATIONISM and DEVIATIONIST LYSENKOISM from a nasty anti-Darwinian named Francis Darwin. Cancel him now!

No doubt if we take a severely logical view of the universe with Descartes, we may be obliged to admit that our actions are the direct inevitable result of what has previously occurred in the world, and that we are forced into a certain action just as inevitably as the mercury in a thermometer is forced to rise to a certain point. But this is a point of view which leads us no further, it is not an instrument of research. To get a point of view which is physiologically valuable we must retain the idea of spontaneity.

What we do at a particular juncture depends on the nature of our previous experiences and actions. The “self” which seems to be spontaneous is the balance which weighs conflicting influences. It is for this reason that even in plant physiology we want the idea of an individuality, a something on which the past experience of the race is written and in which the influences of the external world are weighed. I do not of course imply conscious weighing, nor do I mean that the plant has memory in the sense that we have memory. But a plant has memory in Hering's and Butler's sense of the word, according to which memory and inheritance are different aspects of the same quality of living things. Thus in the movements of plants, as in the instincts of animals, the spontaneity of the individual has disappeared, the balance of profit and loss has been struck during the past experience of the species, and the individual acts by that unconscious memory we call inheritance.

Labels: Carver, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 10:28 AM

  It's fortunate....
It's too bad that Darwin's vague theories about species turned into an ISM. His real scientific EXPERIMENTS, continued by his son Francis, were hugely valuable. We've forgotten the long set of experiments on plant intelligence.

I ran into this 1891 experiment while looking for old devices to animate...

Mr. Francis Darwin, president of the Biological Section, read a paper by himself and Miss D. F. Pertz on "The Artificial Production of Rhythm in Plants." The paper was illustrated by experiments. The apparatus employed is a new form of klinostat designed by the Cambridge Scientific Company. The plant to be experimented on is fixed to a spindle, which, by means of a clockwork escapement, makes a sudden semi-revolution every half hour. Thus the plant is subjected to a series of alternate and opposite influences from light or gravitation, as the case may be. To take the case of gravitation, the plant will tend to curve upwards during the first half-hour, and during the second interval (when the horizontal spindle has made half a turn) it will tend to curve geotropically in the opposite direction.

Under these conditions it is found that a rhythmic state is induced which closely resembles the periodicity in rate of growth which is set up in plants by the alternation of day and night.

A remarkable result is obtained by stopping the clockwork; that is to say, by substituting a continuous for a changing stimulus. The plant continues to curve with an acquired rhythm just as if the clockwork were still in action; it has, in fact, learned and remembered the half-hourly period. This is precisely similar to certain natural rhythms - for instance, to the "sleep" of flowers, which for a short time continue to open and shut although kept constantly in the dark.

This work was forgotten for a long time, and "newly discovered" about 20 years ago, after many decades of THEORY that told us plants can't possibly learn.

Our THEORY, which still battles against the horrible forces of Lamarck and Lysenko, tells us that plants can't possibly remember anything. We call our THEORY Darwinism. It's fortunate that Francis Darwin wasn't a Darwinist.

= = = = =

Here's the Cambridge Instruments klinostat. The plant is clamped (without soil?) in the box, and the clockwork can be set to flip at intervals or turn steadily.



= = = = =

What about Miss Pertz? According to Wikipedia, Dorothea Pertz co-authored five papers with Francis, and gained membership in various societies, but didn't stick around.

After Darwin's retirement, Pertz was encouraged by Frederick Blackman to undertake research on meristematic tissue, but after a year observing germinating seeds her results were inconclusive. She abandoned research, possibly over disappointment, though Agnes Arber claimed "she came to recognize that the plant physiology of the twentieth century was developing on lines widely divergent from those on which she had been educated and that it demanded a grasp of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, which she did not possess."

I'm betting that her grasp of math wasn't the real "divergent lines". More likely she was disappointed by the focus on math and the loss of experimentation. She continued working in botany outside of the academy, making illustrations and indexes for texts.

Labels: Carver, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 5:31 AM

  Good entertainment = good maintenance
In previous item,

The real engineers and architects of the first 1000 were not in Github mode. They built houses and cathedrals to last, because they understood technology was not going to improve soon. The scribes put artistry into their handwritten books, knowing that the books would be used and maintained for centuries. They tried to provide beauty and pleasure for the maintainers, to insure better and longer maintenance. Bookkeepers used indelible ink on heavy paper, and 'illuminated' their ledgers with similar artistry.

Providing beauty and treats for the maintainers is a lost art, but not lost for 1000 years. The practice was fairly common up to 1970 when the whole world of manufacturing and maintenance was hunted to extinction by Wall Street.

Some car makers tried to create a pleasant environment for mechanics. I experienced this sort of pleasure when working on Mercedes and Toyota in the '70s. When you got into the engine compartment, everything you needed for routine maintenance was easy to find, pleasant for the eyes and hands, and satisfying to complete. I never had this experience in a VW or American car.

RCA and Zenith unquestionably followed this rule with their radios in the '20s and '30s. Both brands were beautiful and entertaining outside and inside. The inside included all the info you needed, and often included specialized tools or spare parts.

I try to provide moments of pleasure and beauty in my courseware and graphics. A textbook, whether on paper or software, should include some art and entertainment. I don't know if anyone appreciates them, but I feel obligated to pay back the beauty of life and nature.

Later and better thought: Providing beauty and treats for the maintainers is NOT a lost art outside of human "civilization". Plants have been doing it for a billion years. Flowers and fruits are EXACTLY beauty and treats to insure maintenance.

Labels: Entertainment, Equipoise, Patient things, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 1:58 PM

  Good question leads to bigger question
Via Eurekalert, an interesting study of PURPOSE in plants. The authors have uncovered an important distinction that irresistibly leads to a bigger question.

Mechanical accidents happen to plants fairly often and can, in some cases, stop the plant from being able to attract pollinating insects and so, make seeds. Making seeds and propagating is a flower's main purpose, so injuries which threaten that pose a huge problem."

The author is unwilling to go beyond evolutionary thought, assuming reproduction is the only purpose of life. The plants are trying to tell him something about broader purposes, but he doesn't quite get it, or isn't willing to say it. (Highly understandable and forgivable. Why ruin your career by expressing a fact when the fact is self-evident in the research? Let the readers see it for themselves.)

The study found that bilaterally symmetrical flowers - those in which the left and right sides mirror each other, such as snapdragon, orchid, and sweet pea - can almost always restore their 'correct' orientation by moving individual flower stems or even moving the stalk that supports a cluster of flowers.

Plants' movement after an injury isn't only about making seeds; these plants were seen to bend or twist to make sure their leaves were again facing the Sun, necessary for photosynthesis, the process by which a plant produces its food.

Radially symmetrical flowers, star-shaped flowers, such as petunia, buttercup, and wild rose - lacked this ability and their stems rarely recovered after an injury.

There's another difference between bilateral and radial flowers. Bilateral flowers, and legumes in general, intelligently respond to insects. Snapdragons use their top flap to knock a bee down into the nectar. Clover bends used-up florets out of the way so bees won't waste time on them. Venus flytrap is bilateral.

Another recent discovery may also relate to symmetry. Plants use their petals to hear airborne sound. A bilateral flower can use its hearing differentially to locate a sound. A radial flower focuses sound from a broad area, and can't localize individual sounds across the area. Differential hearing, and differential sensing of gravity, may help the plant to resume its correct orientation.

The bigger question: Animals have the same distinction between radial and bilateral. Radial animals are simple and mostly sessile on the seafloor. Bilateral animals have differential senses, focusing on one direction and moving in one direction. Bilaterals use intelligence actively to accomplish a wide range of purposes.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 5:40 AM

  More philosophy
Another smart bit of philosophy in today's news...

Rethinking plants vs humans.

The dances of plants with birds and plants with bees are well-known, but until now those relationships were assumed to be automatic and "evolved", which excluded humans because humans are assumed to have "free will".

A better overall view assumes EVERYONE is intelligent, and everyone is strategizing ways to accomplish their specific PURPOSES.

Plants made changes in their seeds after humans started to spread plants in our peculiar ways. The changes didn't make domestication easier, so they most likely weren't caused by our selective breeding.

Spengler suggests therefore that scholars studying plant domestication need to let go of preconceptions around human intentionality and agency to better understand plant evolution.

“Domestication is not a great human innovation; it is an extension of a natural process. “By modelling domestication as an equivalent process to evolution in the wild and setting aside the idea of conscious human innovation, we can more effectively study the questions of why and how this process occurred.”

An earlier philosopher with the same name had an equally broad natural view of human history, and made a pretty good prediction about the rising power of Deepstate. Unfortunately he took the wrong side, assuming that EU and Soros would produce a long period of harmonious "Caesarian socialism" starting in 2000. Shakespeare got it right. Deepstate is Brutus, not Caesar.

Labels: 2/3, Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 11:44 PM

  Perfect match
I linked this article on plant intelligence in previous item, as a nice handy example of biologists removing the DarwinIST theory goggles and returning to Darwin's own open-minded curiosity.

The article turns out to be sharply appropriate to the subject of previous item: a naturalist who constantly canceled and erased his own observations to serve DarwinISM.

These authors aren't afraid to talk about smart plants:

"It's not only that the plant can 'sense' or 'smell' a nematode," Schroeder said. "It's that the plant learns a foreign language, and then broadcasts something in that language to spread propaganda that 'this is a bad place'. Plants mess with nematodes' communications system to drive them away."

Here's the specific match: The plants suck up chemicals that the nematodes use for communication within the plant, thus CENSORING the roundworm senses; and then pour out the chemical into the soil, thus blinding the roundworms with fake THEORIES that this plant is already fully parasitized.

The conclusion is beautiful:

He added: "Plants aren't passive green things. They are active participants in an interactive dialog with the surrounding environment, and we will continue to decipher this dialog."

Take that, Burroughs.

Labels: Smarty-plants

  ¶ 7:24 AM

  Acetylene world 2
Following on the prevalence and advantages of acetylene...

A picture from one of Floyd Clymer's books on the T.



Henry with two of his friends, outdoorsman John Burroughs and Thomas Edison.

We know Edison as Mister Electric Light. We don't know anyone as Mister Acetylene.

Union Carbide is the counterpart to GE as systematizer and provider of material and machines, but Union Carbide didn't have any notable inventor/founder figures.

= = = = =

I hadn't heard of John Burroughs, so I sampled his writings. I'm not impressed. He was a good observer of Nature, but he constantly deleted his own clear and crisp observations and replaced them with Darwinist crap.

He marveled at a hemlock tree that had germinated on a partly floating log. The hemlock had formed roots that clasped the log, and sent out one 6-foot-long horizontal root into the soil on shore. Was this intelligence? If he had simply BELIEVED HIS OWN SENSES he would have said Yes. Instead, he CANCELED AND ERASED his own senses:

In the case of the little hemlock upon the partly submerged log, roots were probably thrown out equally in all directions; on all sides but one they reached the water and stopped growing; but on the land side, the root on top of the log, not meeting with any obstacle, kept growing. It was a case of survival, not of the fittest, but of that which the situation favored.

Darwin himself wasn't blinded by Darwin's theories, and made clear observations and clever experiments in plant senses and plant intelligence. Biologists are just now starting to take off the theory goggles, starting to repeat Darwin's own experiments without DarwinIST distortions.

= = = = =

Sidenote: Though Edison's workshop never dealt with acetylene, there is a family connection. Edison's chief mechanic and model builder was John Kruesi. Edison sketched ideas and Kruesi turned them into practical patentable devices. Kruesi's son Paul ended up as head of American Lava, a major manufacturer of acetylene equipment.

Labels: 1901, Patient things, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 2:06 AM

  Egnor misses part of the point
Egnor discusses the failures of mind-less science:

Panpsychists and cosmopsychists like Goff are right about this: Consciousness of some sort permeates the universe and is at the core of our humanity. Materialism is a kind of madness — it is the denial of the most undeniable thing about reality.

But the universe itself is not conscious, nor are inanimate objects. Whether plants are conscious in any sense is doubtful, I think, but it is at least debatable. Animals are obviously conscious, as are we. What cosmopsychists like Goff see correctly is that fundamental reality is more like a Mind than it is like mindless matter. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, and countless other philosophers have made the same point.

No major argument there, just one quibble. I don't think you can leave plants out of the mind circle; they use sensory inputs and memory to make decisions.

The only externally observable evidence of awareness is REM sleep, so complex animals like vertebrates and cephalopods are the only provable mind-owners. This doesn't exclude other living things.

Modern materialism, from which our denial of consciousness springs, was formulated by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and his immediate predecessors in the early modern era. They denied the reality of formal and final causes in nature. They argued that science could only deal with material and efficient causes — stuff hitting stuff, basically.

This is a diminished view of nature, as quantum mechanics has made painfully obvious. It is also entirely unnecessary. Scientists who wish to focus their research on material and efficient causes are free to do so. They can do good (if not profound) science with these impoverished tools.

Here Egnor misses the real problem with recent science. Engineering and some parts of biology are properly and simply materialistic. In all the theory-based parts of Big Science, especially physics, materialism is gone. Gaia has replaced God. Everything is driven by Gaia, an intelligent goddess who uses the tiny micropercent of CO2 to create purposeful and complex effects.

This is not materialism, it's fallacious spiritualism. It's witchcraft or homeopathy, attributing all action to a tiny fractional SINFUL IMPURITY with massive spiritual power.

Labels: defensible spaces, Leth, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 5:38 AM

  Interesting but not quite meaningful yet....
Via New "Scientist":

Previously, devices have been attached to plants to record the vibrations caused by air bubbles forming and exploding – a process known as cavitation – inside xylem tubes, which are used for water transport. But this new study is the first time that sounds from plants have been measured at a distance.

On average, drought-stressed tomato plants made 35 sounds an hour, while tobacco plants made 11. When plant stems were cut, tomato plants made an average of 25 sounds in the following hour, and tobacco plants 15. Unstressed plants produced fewer than one sound per hour, on average.

There's no doubt that plants are intelligent. They have senses and outputs, and they think and communicate.

This particular set of outputs doesn't necessarily serve as communication. It could simply be the result of liquid moving through the veins and capillaries of the stem to reach the injured place or to redistribute water. Insects could certainly use the sound whether it's intentional or not.

Labels: Smarty-plants

  ¶ 12:20 AM

  Seedscrapers
An interesting observation from ZH:

For years, we've cited some fascinating alternative forms of data, such as the Skyscraper Index, which was first elaborated by Andrew Lawrence in January 1999. The index is simple; the world's tallest buildings are often constructed or completed at economic turning points, right before or just as the downturn gets underway.

I've noticed a similar pattern in other realms.

The best expression of a technology or a cultural form tends to happen just after the tech or form has been replaced by another.

Houses are often remodeled just before a divorce, as the foolish husband's last futile effort to please the Insatiable wife.

Plants send out flowers and seeds when they sense trouble approaching.

Labels: Smarty-plants

  ¶ 12:54 AM

  Need to replace used-up conspiracy theories
Most "conspiracy theories" that don't involve Martians have turned out to be essentially true. In fact, many of the realities have turned out to be 10 times weirder and 10 times more evil than the theories.

Time for a little creativity. When "wild" ideas turn out to be drab reality, the stock of "wild" ideas is depleted. Need more "wild" ideas.

How about this?

Plants and bacteria are conspiring to create "global warming".

It makes sense in terms of motivation. Plants need a warm wet world. For most of the earth's existence, plants had what they needed. From 1300 to 1800 we were in an unusual cold period, and plants suffered. When plants suffer, animals and humans suffer as well. We had to develop all sorts of compensatory technologies to keep us alive in the cold period. Since 1800 we've been fading out of the cold, back into the normal warm and wet conditions. Plants love it. When plants flourish, animals and humans flourish.

Conspiracy theory: We know that bacteria are a main player in cloud formation. We also know that forests influence cloud formation. Therefore, bacteria and trees are conspiring to create more clouds, leading to warmer nights and warmer winters and more rain.

= = = = =

Disclaimer: I don't really think this is happening. I think the most likely cause is cyclical changes in the earth's magnetic field and magma flow, heating the crust under the Arctic and moving the deep hot spots that drive ocean currents. The magnetic shift will also change the movements of bacteria, which could influence clouds and currents. But the moving hot spots are the main driver. This hypothesis matches the facts better than any other hypothesis.

= = = = =

Disdisclaimer: HOWEVER, given the universal record of "conspiracy theories" becoming true, I wouldn't bet heavily against my newly invented stupid "theory".


= = = = =

Update three days later:

Fluctuations in the orbital parameters of the Earth are considered to be the trigger for long-term climatic fluctuations such as ice ages. This includes the variation of the inclination angle of the Earth's axis with a cycle of about 40,000 years. Marine scientists have now shown by using a new model that biogeochemical interactions between ocean and atmosphere could also be responsible for climate fluctuations on this time scale.

"In our model, the carbon cycle is largely controlled by plankton living in the surface ocean," explains Prof. Dr. Klaus Wallmann. Plankton consumes atmospheric CO2 via photosynthesis and by microorganisms that degraded plankton biomass and release CO2 back into the atmosphere. Since CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas, the biological CO2 turnover affects surface temperatures and global climate. The growth of plankton is controlled by nutrients that take part in a range of microbial oxidation and reduction reactions.

New record for taming a wild conspiracy theory! Three days from wild parodic stupid imagination to scientific truth.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 2:39 AM

  How sweet thy voice
A massively important discovery about plant intelligence by an Israeli group including Chamovitz, who literally wrote the book on smarty-plants.

In short: Plants hear with their petals.

It's been known for a long time that plants respond to mechanical vibration by insects walking on stems or chewing leaves or touching flowers. Many of those responses (Venus flytrap, mimosa, snapdragon, clover) are quick and visible. There has been a lot of speculation about true hearing of airborne sounds, but no firm evidence until this set of experiments.

Hypothesis:

A possible plant organ that could relay the airborne acoustic signal into a response is the flower itself, especially in flowers with “bowl” shape. If this is the case, we expect that part of the flower (or the entire flower) would vibrate physically in response to the airborne sound of a potential pollinator. We further predict that nectar sugar concentration would increase in response to the sound.

The researchers used all sorts of tricks to isolate the sensor and check the frequency response. The hypothesis was verified. A sound similar to the wingbeats of a plant's preferred pollinator causes a temporary sweetening of the nectar. The sweetening takes a few minutes to develop, so the first bee might not receive the signal. But the first bee is often a scout, so the sugar trap is fresh just in time for the mass of bees who respond to the scout.

The next step in research is to find the mechanism. If the petals are the tympanic membrane, where is the cochlea? More likely the petals ARE the cochlea, directly transducing pressure change.

I discussed this parallel in my earlier piece on Chamovitz, but at that time the basic question about airborne sound hadn't been answered. I was thinking in terms of acoustic response by roots and stems. Now that the petals are known to be the sensors, the parallel is blatantly clear.

The cochlea is a logarithmic spiral because frequencies are sensed logarithmically.



Many flowers are also log spirals.



How about the opposite parallel? Do animals sweeten their pheromones on hearing the voice of the preferred mating type? A preferred sound certainly creates a whole-body pleasure via the vagus nerve and parasympathetic system. The vagus controls many secretions in the skin and gut, and also picks up olfactory signals from incoming pheromones.

So this is highly likely but not yet determined.

= = = = =

Later astonished thought: The delayed sweetness is truly remarkable. It shows that the plant's intelligence is ANTICIPATING a future event and STRATEGIZING to match the beehive's strategy. Other plant responses are much faster and simpler. The snapdragon bops the bee on the head to knock it down into the pollen, and the clover ticks each floret out of the way after it's been consumed.

Labels: bee, Carver, Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 2:25 AM

  Thrifty Nature
Among mammals and birds, intelligent critters live longer. Looks like Nature hates to waste resources. Intelligence takes more brain complexity and more energy, so smart animals live longer and reproduce less often.

Does this correlation extend to other living things? Are turtles supersmart? Many fish have an essentially unlimited lifespan. Are they smarter than short-lived fish? How about plants and trees? Are perennials smarter than annuals? Redwoods smarter than apricots?

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 6:28 AM

  Harder questions
Robert Lanza nicely summarizes the thinking of Chamovitz on plant intelligence and awareness. It's a hard question but basically irresistible. If we acknowledge that dogs and cats and turtles are conscious, we can't stop there. We have to acknowledge plants.

The only LOGICAL line of demarcation is between ME and the rest of the world. I'm aware of my own awareness for sure. I know from talking with other humans that they claim to be aware. Their words sound similar to my internal description, so I accept their 'testimony'. As soon as I accept their 'testimony', I have to go the full distance. Animals, plants, bacteria, everything that has life must be aware.

Lanza doesn't take plant awareness to the next HARD step. Plants and many invertebrates reproduce by budding. Plants also generate fruits and pods that carry seeds.

Does a budded offspring contain only part of the parent's awareness? Does it regenerate a full awareness like a lizard regrowing a tail? Is the bud sharing the parent's awareness in some mysterious action-at-a-distance way? Identical twins might be able to answer this. Conjoined twins who share a brain have already told us how it feels. Lori and Dori talked about their shared awareness as something like a room with partitions. Each could choose to close off the partitions or 'blank out' the other part.

If the adult plant is aware, what about the seed?

We can draw a familiar analogy for seeds. A seed is a new being, just like an animal embryo, so a seed might have its own new awareness. There's a difference. An embryo doesn't go through a long waiting period. As soon as the sperm and egg unite, the embryo starts growing and proceeds directly toward adulthood. Seeds contain an embryo in a suspended condition that can last hundreds of years until the embryo detects the correct conditions to pop out and start rooting and sprouting. Intelligence is present through all those years, because the seed is always ready to sprout. It is aware during all those years? Asleep? Dreaming?



What about a fruit? The yummy tomato that I just ate contained a hundred seeds. Did I extinguish a hundred awarenesses by chomping and digesting them? The fruit itself has its own intelligence, responding quickly to environmental conditions and sending and receiving signals to bugs and other fruits. Did I extinguish it as well?

Labels: Smarty-plants

  ¶ 11:56 AM

  Carver would love this
Carver defined science:

Look about you. Take hold of the things that are here. Let them talk to you.

Botanists at UW did exactly that. They LOOKED at some poplar trees that are growing strongly on bare rocks with no nutrients. Where are the trees getting their nutrients? From bacteria around the roots, like clover? Then the botanists literally TOOK HOLD of the branches. They LET THEM TALK by running experiments. Some of the cut branches were sterilized, some not. Some were exposed to lots of nitrogen, some not. The unsterilized branches picked up nitrogen and grew, the sterilized ones didn't.

Turns out the poplars are storing bacteria in their branches just as clover and alfalfa store bacteria in their roots.

Conclusion is straight out of Carver:

One of the next great challenges will be maximizing food and biomass production in a sustainable way. Tailoring of the microbiome of plants can increase growth with reduced inputs [of external fertilizer].

This is an experiment that COULD have been done in Carver's time, or even in Darwin's time. No genetic sequencing involved. It wasn't done because NOBODY BOTHERED TO LOOK. Botanists were blinded by theory until recently.

Hooray for open eyes!

Labels: Carver, Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 8:51 AM

  Huh?
Article at NPR is discussing an increasing suspicion that consciousness is not just the product of specific parts of the brain. It's more diffuse, including at least the whole nervous system and possibly a LOT more. Makes sense. The more we learn about plant intelligence and gut biomes and the Grand Blueprint, the more uncomfortable we become with the standard division between Humans and Everything Else.

Unfortunately the author doesn't make a readable argument. He says:

"Put simply, for a conscious organism, there is 'something it is like' to be that organism." It's worth noting that this characterization of what it is for an organism to be conscious — that there is something that it is like to be that organism — was first advanced in the 70s by the philosopher Thomas Nagel.

WTF? There is something that it is like to be that organism? The sentence doesn't even parse properly. By my best guess, it's not a statement about the organism itself; it's only declaring that we can draw analogies to some other organism. Says nothing at all about consciousness, let alone the location of awareness.

Reminds me of the usual translations of Anselm:

"God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived"

or Kant:

"Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Both of these statements are perfectly empty and meaningless, but the indecipherable formulation makes them sound HEAVY and DEEP.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Smarty-plants

  ¶ 5:01 AM