Remember that Mythbusters (Episode 61 Deadly Straw) that re-created Cleve Backster’s primary perception experiments to show plants can sense malicious intent and totally re-created his results? I had to re-watch it to make sure I was remembering correctly. They totally just alter the experiment until they break it, then sweep it under the rug and call it busted. Totally.
So it’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I do remember that episode. I went through the wiki a bit and read up on some of Backster’s experiments and how they were received by the scientific community… not great. It is a very intriguing subject, but I think it gets anthropomorphized pretty bad. Even the title here, “plants do scream” almost implies consciousness. I do think there are mechanisms that plants may have evolved that we don’t fully understand. Like holding onto water or nutrients if there are more plant clicks (screams) happening nearby. But we have to be scientific about this. In the article, they talk about possible sources of the clicks possibly being air bubbles escaping the plant. Jumping to some of the conclusions that were explored in the past like “plants have ESP” are tall claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Claims like that were never reproducible, so we shouldn’t believe them. I think plants are amazing, and we should keep studying stuff like this, but best to stay realistic and phrase these findings appropriately. Just my two cents.
Well, sort of. Not in the same way you or I might scream. Rather, they emit popping or clicking noises in ultrasonic frequencies.
Another “science” community with clickbaity bullshit.
Eh… What? It’s an interesting article. The screaming is in quotation marks. So as far as I’m concerned, the title is fine.
Vegans: … uh… now what?
Vegans consume fewer plants than anyone else. It takes a LOT of plants to raise a cow, pig, or chicken. From an economic point of view, meat is a way of refining mountains of cheap, plentiful, safe plant products into a scarce, harmful and addictive luxury product. This comes up a lot, you’d be amazed how many plants rights activists your average vegan runs into.
…addictive?
Addictive like water and air are addictive.
Unless you count grass and non-human consumables and non-potable water…sure…until then that’s bullshit.
How is that bullshit? I am not vegan, but that’s just a scientific consensus and a major reason why plant diet is way lower carbon than a meat diet. If you need to grow plant food for your animal food, eventually you have to grow way more plant food.
Most animals raised for meat consumption are fed with crops, notably soy, not wild grass.
Thinking animals raised for meat only consume resources (land (first cause of biodiversity loss), plants, water, energy) that would not be useful to humans anyway is undoubtedly wrong.Researchers Poore and Nemecek are a great source of meta-analysis information about those subjects. Check this summary here for example: http://environmath.org/2018/06/17/paper-of-the-day-poore-nemecek-2018-reducing-foods-environmental-impacts/
Let me know if I misunderstood your point.
It’s less important that such arguments be factually accurate than that they are superficially convincing enough to distract the person giving the argument from thoughts and feelings they are unwilling to process.
What figures are you basing your ignorance off of? The majority of the plants humans grow through crop-based agriculture are fed to non-human animals. Animal ag is one of the largest consumers of fresh (ie “potable”) water. There are ten animals living in human possession for every human on Earth. Without intensive plant agriculture, we could not possibly feed them all. Grass and run-off is not what is producing your food.
And since we are specifically discussing the hypothetical suffering of plants, why wouldn’t you count grass? You’re triggered.
Vegans: we’ll have only a little vegetable cruelty, as a treat.
Whatever keeps the high horse fed.
You’re going to have to unpack this a bit more for me.
Edit: Ohhhh, you’re another one of those plant rights activists. Buddy, I eat plants for breakfast. You know what? Now I’m going to eat twice as many plants, just because it upsets you.
I remember this mythbusters episode. They basically detected that plants “might “ scream or signal to other plants. They got some weird outliers too.
You misremember it a bit. They saw “activity” when the thing was connected to the plant. Then they moved the plant into a steel container and the readings stopped. They hypothesized that they detected something like vibrations from a busy street etc, not a plant “screaming”.
It’s been years since I’ve seen it, so yeah that’s probably right
Mythbusters episodes are all over YouTube free for everyone. Just a little FYI in case you feel nostalgic
Link to the channel?
Huh, for me, that link redirects to https://www.youtube.com/MythBusters, which displays this:
Maybe it’s not available in Canada?
Could be geoblocked. There’s another channel too somewhere. Cold try googling it. Or setting VPN to somewhere in EU
Oh im gonna watch some mythbusters.
