Natures wonders: new found plant defenses (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, September 19, 2020, 10:14 (1314 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?

I missed out the following quotation from another post:
DAVID (under “Guppies”): A neat designed defense. This could not have developed over time or guppies would not have survived.

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.

DAVID: These articles keep appearing and I will keep presenting, so thank you for cheering me on.

What keeps this website going is not only the wonders, but also your amazing capacity for keeping us updated on the latest research in all the different fields – even on those rare occasions when the research goes against your own beliefs, as with the question of new genes. Our own discussions tend to go round in circles, but may sometimes help to clarify ideas. The articles you present are an ongoing education, which more than fulfils the hopes I had when I opened the website. So I am the one to say thank you, and yes, I’ll cheer you on even in the midst of our battles!

DAVID: 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.

All this is also educational, but misses the point of my post. I’m not arguing for chance hunt-and-peck. But “finding the right combination of protein molecules with the proper functions” takes time, and although attacks by pests and by new diseases is immediate and constant, the fact that they cause death and destruction shows that the “cure” DOES take time, as cells and cell communities search for the right combination. Once cures have been found, they are passed on, and so babies are born with immediate defences, and bacteria become resistant to our efforts to destroy them. My point is that the system (I propose cellular intelligence, which does the "designing") is there from the beginning, but it constantly adapts as it has to work out defences against new threats. The “cures” are NOT there from the beginning. And I would extend this to the whole mechanism of evolution, as intelligent cells / cell communities respond to new conditions by adapting themselves (process proven) or by creating brand new structures (speciation - process unproven).