Reddit Reddit reviews What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses

We found 6 Reddit comments about What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses
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6 Reddit comments about What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses:

u/NeurotoxicNihilist · 8 pointsr/botany

I personally really enjoyed What a Plant Knows. It was the core reading for my intro to botany course, and it uses peer-reviewed academic papers to present cool topics on how plants interact with the world around us.

Edit: I saw you like Pollan too? How to Change Your Mind is a cool read for the crossover of botany, ethnobotany, and neurochem.

u/e_e_monkey · 8 pointsr/gifs

Not true. The plant can sense when it's touching another thing. Actually plants "know" a lot of things. They have "senses" - of touch, "smell", "vision".

If you want to know more I recommend this wonderful book (What A Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz): https://www.amazon.com/What-Plant-Knows-Field-Senses/dp/0374533881

u/growweedeasy · 6 pointsr/microgrowery

Thanks for the tip!

Another really great book along these lines is What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz.

It's super cheap (under $20) and is written specifically to be interesting to someone who doesn't have a botany degree. It's a lot more relaxing to read than most plant books and I found myself breezing through it. The author covers lots of really cool stuff including photoperiodism, how plants respond to touch, light spectrum, gravity, and more.

u/oakleafy · 2 pointsr/botany

I've head only great things about What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses, by Daniel Chamovitz. Haven't read it yet myself but it's at the top of my list!

u/berniebrother · 1 pointr/vegan

Here's my proof:

I'll lead with this 2014 peer-reviewed meta-analysis of 48 peer-reviewed research studies into the reaction of plants to external stimuli. 40 of 48 studies found that plants have the ability to sense external stimuli and/or communicate their findings. How many of those 48 find that plants' ability to feel pain is involved? Zero.

Next up: Tel Aviv University’s director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences, Daniel Chamovitz, one of the leading plant intelligence researchers today, wrote the 2012 book What A Plant Knows, a great overview of how we think plants can do the equivalents of hearing, smelling, touching, and seeing. Notably absent? Feeling pain. Here's Chamovitz on the subject:

"The idea that damage has to be pain is mistaken. We feel pain because we have specific types of receptors called nociceptors which are programmed to respond to pain, not to touch."

Even the most emphatic believers in plant intelligence - Frantisek Baluska and Stefano Marcuso - have never once equated plant "pain" to animal (neurobiological) pain. In fact, Baluska specifically changed the name of his scientific journal, Plant Signalling and Behavior to remove the word "Neurobiology" because of the complete lack of evidence therein.

Anyway - your turn. And let me just say, before you think of citing that Daily Mail article, or the How Stuff Works article making the rounds, just know that both are based on this 2000 paper from the University of Bonn. That paper raises the concept of plant pain exactly zero times, revealing those DM/HSW stories to be the sensationalist internet hit grabs that they are.

So, go ahead! One reputable scientific paper that says plants feel pain. One! You believe what you believe against the weight of all scientific evidence, unless you can prove otherwise.

u/kristalsoldier · -1 pointsr/philosophy

You may also want to reconsider your vegetarian diet since plants experience "pain" too. See here