Veganism/Vegetarianism

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This is not as scientific website, all appearances to the contrary.
I'm a biologist. Vascular tissue is vascular tissue, not nervous tissue. It carries water and sugar back and forth through the plant. I've dissected plenty of plants as well as animals. Plants do have hormones that are released in one area due to some envrionmental stimulus and carried by the vascular tissue to other areas, but that does not mean that they have nervous systems, that they can feel, or that they are capable of responding to their environment even at the level of a flatworm or a clam. Probably better than a sponge, but not as good as a cnidarian.

This is not as scientific website, all appearances to the contrary.
I'm a biologist. Vascular tissue is vascular tissue, not nervous tissue. It carries water and sugar back and forth through the plant. I've dissected plenty of plants as well as animals. Plants do have hormones that are released in one area due to some envrionmental stimulus and carried by the vascular tissue to other areas, but that does not mean that they have nervous systems, that they can feel, or that they are capable of responding to their environment even at the level of a flatworm or a clam. Probably better than a sponge, but not as good as a cnidarian.[/quote]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmD-RTmNBUA[/youtube]

What do you make of experiments like this? Some researchers have actually shown, through monitoring the electro-magnetic activity of a plant, that they can sense stress in the environment, even from stresses that humans and animals are specifically experiencing that really shouldn't relate to the plant in any way. A strong correlation may hint at this being a possibility anyway.

I know the vascular tissue primarily is there to channel water and nutrients into the plants, much like how our mobility as animals is primarily there for us to gather resources from the environment for our survival. However, the intelligent way in which roots navigate into the soil to find water might be a sign of some type of awareness, just like our ability to intelligently forage may be a sign of awareness to onlooking extra-terrestrials.

Our esophagus or circulatory system correlate even more directly to the function of vascular tissues of plants in their function than mobility. They channel resources gotten from the environment to be processed by the body. Even they possess intelligences though, due to interfacing with neurological tissue. There's taste buds on the way to the stomach that send signals to the brain about the chemical profile of the food. The heart is bundled in a bunch of neurons that not only get communicated to by the brain but communicate back to the brain.

Look up the phenomenon of transplanted memories, Heart transplant recipients often report spontaneously gaining new eating habits and personality traits, only to find out later that these were traits of the donor. What strikes me about this is the memories they receive are very subconscious, but the only reason the subconscious seems unconscious is because its drowned out by higher cognitive functions, much like how a bright light source will over power a more dimly lit one.

Yes, the roots have a primary function of transporting water, but they also have another function of intelligently seeking water sources through the root tip. You could go with a purely mechanistic explanation, that its just operating like a wind up toy, but being that its closer to a human due to its cellular complexity, I'm apt to think some sort of awareness or perception may be at play.

^ ^ ^

you should not believe everything you see on youtube.

ruveyn

Chemotaxis, phototaxis, and hydrotaxis is a sign of programming, not awareness. These functions are so simple that we can program robots to do them with relatively little problem.


Yes, our vascular system performs a similar function to the vascular system of plants... that's why they both fit the definition of vascular systems. However, WE have nervous tissue and plants do not, and even that vascular/digestive nervous tissue is not complicated enough that it requires any thought or awareness on our part.


I say again, this is FALSE. There is no substantiated case of a transplant recipient subconsicously 'knowing' anything about the donor that they could not have found out through mundane means.


Then be honest enough to admit that it is an article of faith for you, and not based on any letitimate evidence.
We KNOW with no ambiguity that animals can suffer; pretending that plants can suffer too, in order to pretend that a vegetarian diet is no more compassionate than an omnivorous one, is dishonest to yourself and to the world at large - and I say this as someone who is only mostly vegetarian. My mom made a Moroccan lamb stew last week and I had two servings - it was excellent.

Whoa, I had you totally wrong! You're actually making a supernatural claim about plants! I thought that you were talking about them reacting to sunlight, or something.

(Note: I'm not saying that it isn't true. I'm using "supernatural" to mean "not explainable using current physics".)

My answer is simple, then: I don't believe it. It it's true, run a huge study and win your Nobel prize in physics.

I don't think that pain perception and suffering requires consciousness. It only requires a nervous system that responds to pain stimuli. I mean, we don't link pain perception to intelligence, so why link it to consciousness?

Both terms are somewhat elusive and hard to define btw. I would rather speak of self-awareness in this context, and I think that all organisms with a nervous system are self-aware.

One of the authors of this website, Dr. Frantisek Baluska, is a faculty member at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Bonn, leads a research group on plant cell biology, and has co-published literature on the biocommunication of plants. That looks scientific to me. But I have to admit that I'm not a biologist.

Btw, what do you make of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_neurobiology ? The article mentions that plant neurobiology is controversial, but I'm not sure that it can be dismissed as pseudo-science.

Last edited by CrazyCatLord on 20 Feb 2012, 6:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Since I've changed my diet to 90% vegetable, I've lost almost 20 pounds in about 8 weeks. I'll not give up meat entirely, but it's no longer the greater portion of my diet.

Both low protein, high carb diets and low carb, high protein diets can help lose and maintain weight. I've tried both, and the latter works better for me because I can't eat much fiber due to Crohn's disease. A low carb diet can also help starve off pathogenic bacteria and yeasts in the gut flora, which can contribute to Crohn's. So I guess it depends on the individual what works best. For me, that is 70% meat in my diet.

I don't believe everything I see pertaining to anything, but I've read up on several of these types of experiments, and I think there might actually be something to them.

Well, I'm combining multiple sources. There's the more scientific evidence of plant perception, like the electro-chemical processes that root cells use to communicate to one another when growing to find plant sources. If a network of root cells communicate to one another in a very similar manner to how neurons communicate to each other, then you have to wonder whether or not there's some sort of consciousness to it, at least in a really rudimentary form.

Then, yah, there's the polygraph studies that contradict our basic understanding and assumptions of physics. When emf fields spike in a plant that's directly harmed, that really doesn't contradict it, as it looks like a direct response from an organism that's being directly harmed. When its alleged to spike when other organisms in close proximity are harmed or stressed, that would contradict current, scientific explanation of reality, as it suggests an extra sensory phenomena, if its a valid or repeatable correlation anyway. It probably doesn't help my case to bring up stuff that can be dismissed as pseudoscience, but I found it interesting and think there's something to it, so I posted it.

It may actually be that the plant actually sense emf's around it or even chemicals that other organism's spread int he air. That could be a materialistic explanation. other than some mystical thing or that the studies are badly conducted.

I don't want to pretend to know what it is either, but there's lots of other evidence, that doesn't go into supernatural territory, that demonstrates the complexities of plant sensitivities, intelligence (or the appearance of intelligence), and possible sentience.

One plant communicating with another is sort of like one fax machine communicating with another. Information is exchanged, sure, but neither partner is even remotely conscious of sending or receiving the message or of the message's content.


The term 'neurobiology' implicitly suggests a 'neuro,' or nervous system. Plants do not have neurons. It is perfectly true that they are complex organisms that adapt on their own timescales, but that does NOT make them conscious any more than the very complex fax machine/photocopier/scanner that can be programmed with local settings is conscious. The claim that plants display action potentials is laughable nonsense; that term in biology is specifically applied to the transmission of a signal along the axon of a nerve cell.

None of this is absolutely outside of the realm of possibility, but the idea that plants have some sort of sentience (much less that they have some sort of ESP!) is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far I haven't seen extraordinary evidence (or, frankly, much evidence at all).

I have a point of view similar to Burzum's on this subject. Factory farming isn't an argument against eating meat. It's an argument against factory farming. In 1st World countries it's pretty common for meat eating to be equivalent to eating factory farmed animals. However, that doesn't mean it's the only possible way. Lots of people (like me, I assume like Burzum) are finding ways to eat animals that spent their lives on a non-factory farm. Is it economically possible for farms to go back to this on a large scale and replace factory farming? I don't know. But my meat $$ go to support farmers who do it the old fashioned way.

Five pages of discussion, and nobody has brought up the most compelling argument against veg(etari)anism? It's only two words long: Constant flatulence.

I'm not a vegetarian myself (I like meat too much) but I have great respect for those who are. I feel guilty when I bother to think about how I'm eating an animal. Also, vegetarianism is a lot more environmentally friendly.