Being Green: A new book marvels at the strangeness of plants | Hacker News Reader

Being Green: A new book marvels at the strangeness of plants

slate.com

60 pointsPetiver11 comments

A friend recently discovered a very strange plant growing in their garden. It seemed utterly alien. They used an online visual tool to identify it. It turns out it's something called "horsetail" and it's considered a "living fossil". (In its later stages of life it does look much more plant-like).

Via wiki:

> Equisetum is the only living genus in Equisetaceae, a family of vascular plants that reproduce by spores rather than seeds.

> Equisetum is a "living fossil", the only living genus of the entire subclass Equisetidae, which for over 100 million years was much more diverse and dominated the understorey of late Paleozoic forests. Some equisetids were large trees reaching to 30 m (98 ft) tall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equisetum

The plants that we see right now are just a snapshot of what's currently successful. If we eventually find alien life somewhere, the strangeness might look a lot like the earth-bound "aliens" of our own past.

Well they are fairly common (seen them around here too), although they do look a little strange. What amazes me from the Wikipedia article: "People have regularly consumed horsetails. For example, the fertile stems bearing strobili of some species are cooked and eaten like asparagus(a dish called tsukushi in Japan)."

If something is edible, people will probably have identified and eaten it. I suspect this didn't happen in the modern period of 'consumer culture', just for the taste and thrills but likely during the numerous periods of famine in history.

Like grasspea ( "Lathyrus sativus", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lathyrus_sativus ), sort of a bean which strangely, can be eaten a few times to fend off starvation but "The crop is harmless to humans in small quantities, but eating it as a major part of the diet over a three-month period can cause permanent paralysis below the knees in adults and brain damage in children, a disorder known as lathyrism."

Imagine having nothing to eat but grasspea, each day telling yourself: "Last time, tomorrow I'll have a nice loaf of bread with steak". Only to resort to grasspeas again, each day closer to the point of no return.

Understanding how plants live is always going to be a useful endeavour. But trying to judge whether a word like "intelligence" applies to them isn't really about plants any more, but about how we should define the word. Many of the words that we use aren't strictly well-defined when you start thinking about them. "Vehicle" was one that was discussed a while ago, in the context of a sign banning vehicles in a park.

Subtitled:

> A new book marvels at the strangeness of plants—and tries a little too hard to explain how they’re like people.

If you're ever at risk of thinking that plants are like people, you can cure it by reading about alternation of generation in bryophytes. If bryophytes were like humans it would be like if our (haploid) sperm/eggs went out and got a job and an apartment and a social life and only bothered spin up a (diploid) human for sexy times. Plants are bizarre.

To be fair, the article does warn:

>> Rejecting the anthropomorphism that permeates the preceding 10 chapters, she cautions that “putting too human a sheen on plant intelligence is a failure of imagination.”

A courtesy caveat emptor for the objective passersby suffering from acute antilibrary fatigue.

Looks like an interesting book. The author will be giving a talk at Powell's in downtown Portland next week - I just might go and check it out.

I still wonder how a seed knows how to grow

Is it like a baby/mitosis/dna, why does it grow

I don't know, but germination has probably been studied a lot: <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7824603/>

Thanks will skim through that

A seed is a small plant plus nutrients, it knows how to grow the same way as a mature plant does.

I mean why... why does the starch part turn into a stem

Reply on news.ycombinator.com