Do plants feel pain?

I say when we finally destroy the last of the rainforests we genetically engineer a tree that can grow taller than a redwood but grow faster than cudsew(sp?) and plant them everywhere. Imagine finding cars and parts of buildings at the tops of trees.

The plants are thinking about revenge perhaps?

 

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i dunno about that. trees make me think nature as in calm not exactly wild.

 

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kudzu

you've seen Lord of the Rings, right? I want to live in the elven tree city.

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The feeling of pain costs ressources. Thus, any organism will only be adapted to feel pain if it gived it a net advantage, if it is worth the ressource used. An animal can move away from something painful, or otherwise ract to the pain. It can cry out, to warn others. A plant can do little to avoid injury, and it cant communicate. Even if it could, its warnings would be of no use. It is not worth the ressource for plants to feel pain.

edtlov: If you are looking for something NOT in the EMF realm, those instruments will be of no use to you.

Hans

 

i think you're all forgetting someone very important

Poison Ivy : I'm Nature's arm, her spirit, her will . . . Hell, I am Mother Nature.

i think if she were out of Archam right now, she'd have something to say to you vegans!

(spell check on archam, im just attentive enough to look up the quote, too lazy to bother spelling the name of the assylum)

 

what about the Girrafes

what do the girraffes eat?

 

Re: what about the Girrafes

they eat leaves and bark. why?


edit:
splunk: there is a Tool song where the singer preaches that he had a vision where an angel tells him about how harvest day is the holocost for the carots. A lesson in being a consumer, something has to suffer for us to live.

 

no they dont

i know what hes talking about, its in the book Lost World by Michael Crichton... let me see if i can find it



river-wind: i am by no means a vegan. i agree completely, lower forms of life are to be eaten

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just shining a different light on the subject!

 

What, do you mean that they don't eat the leaves and bark, but digest the byproducts of the bacteria which live in their gut and break down the cellulose which makes up the plant matter which they consume?


cause they certainly don't eat zebra.

 

okay, ripleofdeath, i think i found what u were talking about
the following is an excerpt from Michael Crichton's The Lost World

" "We realize that plants, in their ceaseless struggle to survive, have evolved everything from complex symbiosis with other animals, to signaling mechanisms to warn other plants, to outright chemical warfare."
Kelly frowned. "Signaling? Like what?"
"Oh there are many examples," Levine said. "In Africa, acacia trees evolved very long, sharp thorns-- 3 inches or so-- but that only provoked animals like giraffes and antelope to evolve long tounges to get past the thorns. Thorns alone didn't work. So, in the evolutionary arms race, the acacia trees next evolved toxicity. They started to produce large quantites of tannin in their leaves, which sets off a lethal metabolic reaction in the animals that eat them. Literally kills them. At the same tame, the acacias also evolved a chemical warning system among themselves. If an antelope begins to eat one tree in a grove, that tree releases the chemical ethylene into the air, which causes other trees in the grove to step up the production of leaf tannin. Within 5 or 10 minutes, the other trees are producing more tannin, making themselves poisonous."
"And what happens to the antelope? It dies?"
"Well, not anymore," Levine said, "because the evolutionary arms race continued. Eventually, antelopes learned that they could only browze for a short time. Once the trees started to produce more tannin, they had to stop eating it. And the browsers developed new strategies. For example, when a giraffe eats an acacia tree, it then avoids all the trees downwind. Instead, it moves to another tree some distance away. So the animals have adapted to this defense too." "


although that doesnt really answer the question about whether plants feel pain, it is interesting to note. by the way, anyone who hasnt yet read Jurassic Park by Crichton, do it. now. Lost World was allright, but Crichton sold out bringin malcom back. damn sellout.

 

oh, I've got you. yeah, ripening fruit chemically signals the other fruit to ripen. Elm trees w/ Dutch Elm disease signal the other trees int he area, which beef up their immune system. there is a limited level of signalling between some plant individuals. not to nearly the same degree as in animals, but some.

There are studies right now looking at bacterial signalling.

 

Here's the deal

Firstly, you have to think about what our definition of "pain" is. Really, it's just a perception by our brain of an electical signal sent through our nervous system.

Do plants have a nervous system? Of course not! BUT, they are able to send signals (hormones, etc.) from one part of the plant to another. When a plant is attacked by a pathogen (bacteria, fungus, etc.), it has the ability to recognize the pathogen and mount defenses. Since it can't run down to the corner pharmacy and pick up some antibiotics it relies on its ability to synthesize it's own antimicrobial compounds (phytoalexins, reactive oxygen species, etc.) that function to fight off the infection. A signal is sent from the infected part of the plant to the rest of the plant so that it can prepare itself for further infection. It also produces ethylene which easily evaporates and signals surrounding plants to mount their defenses (usually in the case of insect feeding). This response is called systemic acquired resistance. One interesting aspect of this response is the production of salicylic acid (aka asprin) that you and I take for a headache or other pains.

This, therefore, begs the question: Is a plant producting salicylic acid because it's in pain? Probably not - but who knows. Their responses to "pain" ARE very similar to ours (perception -> reaction -> effect). So...why not!. Sure, they feel pain!

 

that type of thing is more akin to our endo-/exo-crine systems than to a nervous system. they'll eventually be "aware" in a non-anthropomorphized way that they're no longer receiving nutrients or respiring.

 

the plain fact is, plants do not have any system capable of giving it pain as we understand it (no CNS).

if ur going to claim that plants feel pain when an insect is attacking it (as opposed to stimulus/response), then why not claim it experiences pleasure, too. After all, plants have been known to "follow the sun" so to speak. Are they seeking pleasure, though? No, their cells are simply growing at a more accelerated rate in that direction.

theres no reason to assume that pain causes them to give off those chemicals any more than there's reason to assume pleasure makes them move toward the sun.

 

I guess my point was that we really don't have any idea. Plants move towards the sun because a signal is sent to the cells of the stem opposite the sun which tells them to expand. Therefore, the leaves tip towards the light. What's to say the plant isn't doing this because it enjoys the sunshine. I agree that this is likely not the case - but who knows?!?

 

You are exactly right. We do not know. We do not know even if other human beings feel pain. It is one of the perennial problems of science and philosophy since pain is subjectives and first-person, and thus beyond the domain of science and objective observation.

Many people think they know, and perhaps they're right, but there can NEVER be any scientific proof either way.

 

Maybe at the first stages of evolutions, 'proto-plants' had the 'instinct' to stay in one place, therefore these protoplants develop ed very little sensory....

 

if you take a solution of water and lipids, the lipids will over time, bond together. they will then, over time, form bubbles. These bubbles will move on their own, in reaction to light!


They aren't alive persay, but th emolecules on the side facing th light source have more photo energy, and radiate that. this produces enough force to move them away from the light source.

This applies to the thread, IMO, because if we are talking about pleasure/pain and reaction, at what point does the reaction switch from chemical (such as in this case) to plants following the sun? could it be that the cells int he plant stem exposed to more light will have a different internal presure due to the increase in sloar energy, causing them to expand, bending the stem in such a way that the flower pivots to follow the sun? or is the plant in some way or another aware of it's need to face the sun, and does so?

If it's just chemical in plants, where do we stand? Our awareness seems to be closly tied to, and can be altered by, chemical componants. Is our reaction just chemically driven? Many times, it seems to be. other times, it seems to not be. What drives human actions? If we can figure that out, I bet we can figure out if plant feel pain.

 

Excellent point RW. However we can't figure it out. For sound logical reasons we are unable to prove the existence of consciousness. We are therefore unable to prove the existence of any 'qualia', including that of pain.

The question is therefore not whether plants feel pain, but whether human beings do. Scientists are currently unable to answer this question.

There are reports that we do but those are too subjective to be taken as evidence. Because of this in the current scientific model all human beings (with the exception of the oneself of course) may well be zombies that just give the external appearance of being conscious. For science it is an insoluble dilemma.

 

Plants are absolutely "aware" that they need to follow the sun. The bending towards light (phototropism) is not caused by the expansion of cells due to an increase in solar energy. It is hormonal. Studies have shown that the growth towards light is caused by an elongation of the cells at the side that is shielded from the light. The phototropic reaction does not happen if the leaf tip is removed, though it can be induced again by the replacement of the tip. This indicates the existence of a something (auxin) that travels from tip to bottom that causes the elongation.

My point of the above message is that no one knows why auxin is sent to cells shielded from light. It is likely because the plant wants to move into the light and receive energy to make food.

Since we can't ask the plant (as we can another human), we don't know. Therefore, it could just as easily be moving towards the light because it "enjoys" the sun. This probably isn't the case, but it's fun to think it might be true.