Natures wonders: new found plant defenses (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 18, 2020, 15:06 (1525 days ago) @ dhw

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?

dhw: 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.

These articles keep appearing and I will keep presenting, so thank you for cheering me on. The problem with developing a defense is recognizing the complexity of the defense and finding the right combination of protein molecules with the proper functions. Chance hunt-and-peck won't do it. In using bacteria as an example you forget they multiply every 20 minutes and use gene transfer. Plants crawl along in growth and reproduction. But attacks by pests are immediate and constant. As for humans remember babies are born with immediate defenses such as interferon and if nursing from colostrum antibodies. In adults antibodies appear immediately and in large enough numbers over a very short period of time. Recovery from flu is about two weeks. I'll stick with design.