Natures wonders: new found plant defenses (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 18, 2020, 11:05 (1308 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTES: Far from being passive victims, plants have evolved potent defenses: chemical compounds that serve as toxins, signal an escalating attack, and solicit help from unlikely allies.

Plants also make use of underground networks to warn each other of impending danger. Many species have a symbiotic relationship with a soil-borne fungus

During a hard-fought battle, a plant must tend to its injuries.

DAVID: An amazing list of plant defenses, by God's design. How would chance mutations solve these problems? Would plants survive the time it took to find answers?

First and foremost, once more huge thanks for all the "wonders" articles – and especially this one on plants. These posts are a real education in themselves. I’ve cherry-picked the above quotes because yet again they raise the whole question of cellular and organismal intelligence. The expressions used (“solicit help”, “warn”, “make use of” “tend to”) show just how difficult it is to describe these actions without implying a form of awareness. Not our own form, of course, but an intelligence confined to working out strategies for survival. I agree with you that chance mutations are so unlikely as to be out of the question. I do not agree with you that these defences could not have taken time to evolve. I’m not going to ask you why your God, whose sole purpose was apparently to design H. sapiens, would have stepped in to design these particular defences, but I will ask you why plants can’t “take time” though you know that bacteria take time to find solutions to the problems we humans set them, and billions of them die until they find a means of combating the new threat. New diseases kill humans and it takes time for a cure to be found or the body to develop its own defences. Many plants would no doubt also have died until the defences were found. But disease does not mean extinction. New attackers will continue to succeed until the surviving victims can develop a successful defence.