In the retrospect of the publicity over Behe’s Devolution book, which exposes Darwinian evolution as the devourer rather than the builder of novelty in life systems, the sophisticated arithmetic calculation done by plants provide proof that, at the very least, if this ability evolved, it couldn’t have been by any know evolutionary mechanism today….
“Plants do complex arithmetic calculations to make sure they have enough food to get them through the night, new research published in journal eLife shows. Scientists at Britain’s John Innes Centre said plants adjust their rate of starch consumption to prevent starvation during the night when they are unable to feed themselves with energy from the sun. They can even compensate for an unexpected early night. here
“This is the first concrete example in a fundamental biological process of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation,” mathematical modeler Martin Howard of John Innes Centre (JIC) said. During the night, mechanisms inside the leaf measure the size of the starch store and estimate the length of time until dawn. Information about time comes from an internal clock, similar to the human body clock.
“The capacity to perform arithmetic calculation is vital for plant growth and productivity,” JIC metabolic biologist Alison Smith said.
However, as some of you who don’t like to give me too much credit may already suspect the sophisticated arithmetic abilities of plants don’t end at this level of math… In the light of the undeniable evidence that the efficiency of the life-sustaining process of photosynthesis depends on quantum mechanics it seem logical that if plants have to do the very sophisticated math to calculate their starch reserves to survive, they also may have to be able to do some quantum mechanics equations to figure the intensity of light source depending on how long the “night” lasts, whether 8, 12 or 16 hours…(Unless of course Darwinists can isolate a watch inside the plant cells designed by the blind watchmaker that can detect photons in superposition in order to ascertain time…
If it is true that plants have the ability to not only sense quantum superposition of photons but also measure time, which it appears to be the case, the plants would have to have 2 sets of computers evolved separately; one to calculate the starch reserves and the second one to calculate the probabilities of quantum superposition or even another way of measuring time based on quantum mechanics…
I guess for Darwinists 2 simultaneous mutations will do to explain that…;-)
Who needs the involvement in pointless arguments with Darwinists over chloroquine resistance to bury Darwinism? The sophisticated arithmetic calculation abilities by plants will do…😉
That you would use mathematics to do things that plants do, is not evidence that plants actually use mathematics.
Can you propose an alternative to mathematics?
Trial and error — finding out what works.
When you throw a rock through the air, the rock solves the equations for an ellipse in order to know where to land. Explain that, Darwinists!
My PhD research project (not a huge success) involved investigation of a potential enzymatic clock involved in photoperiodism in plants. Plants ‘measure’ daylength, and my supervisor had discovered an enzyme extract that, apparently, operated on a similar period to the plant itself.
Likewise birds. When quail have ink injected under the scalp, shielding the pineal gland, they lose the normal seasonal response for mating and nest-building. Therefore God.
Likewise one particular species of wallaby, whose melatonin levels in the female determine their time of ovulation with a precision of within two days (the species is an annual breeder).
Obviously, they are doing J-Mac’s complicated maths thing as well (this was discovered by evolutionary biologists in the 1980s).
I have proved by exhaustive testing that my potted Zygocactus cannot beat me at chess.
It may be able to defeat me at photosynthesis (I blame my albino great-grandfather), but it is forever stuck in its pot and dependent on me for its watery sustenance, forever following its genetic algorithms.
Ha! Take that, spiny sub-mathematician.
You may be able to do that arithmetic stuff, but we humans have invented algebra, differentiation and trigonometry. So keep sucking on your roots and perhaps you will eventually work out how to board a bus and get yourself a job in the finance industry.
Dang, it just put my Queen in check.
Allan Miller,
Or therefore lucky accident.
Its one or the other.
The difference being that the trajectory of the rock is determined by forces which are external to it, the initial force applied, gravity and air resistance. The rock has no control over any qualities it possesses that do affect the outcome. Qualities such as its mass and aerodynamic properties.
On the other hand the plant itself is making adjustments to suit external conditions. This is an integral wisdom that the rock does not have. This wisdom should not be thought of as equivalent to conscious human wisdom, it is a wisdom revealed to us when we discover the laws of the plant’s nature.
CharlieM,
Yes, I was dumbfounded reading that as if it is comparable in any way whatsoever. Were we supposed to consider the rock to be doing something?
Or were we to consider the plant to be doing nothing?
phoodoo,
I mean he might as well have said, “well, plants also break in half if you cut them with an axe. See, math.”
We see this sacrificial aspect of life everywhere we look, at all levels. Plants remain at a lower stage which provides for and sustains other forms of life in their progression towards higher stages of consciousness. (Observe your tongue-in-cheek pride in the conscious activities you mention. Activities which would have been unachievable without the plant world providing for us.)
Seed potatoes are sacrificed in order that a whole new plant can grow and develop, placentas are sacrificed for the further development of the animal, skin and blood cells are sacrificed daily to maintain the organism as a whole. The parts are sacrificed in order to sustain the whole.
CharlieM,
Just trail and error luck.
Must have been an awful lot of errors in the past.
Why don’t you just say you don’t like the implications of supreme design?
Is the rock alive, Joe?
Maybe if Darwinists explained how a rock became alive, we wouldn’t be having this discussion today…
BTW: I can hear at least one Darwinist typing away how ‘…if we could put the rock next to thermo-vents the rock would eventually become a self-replicating molecule…”😉
False dichotomy.
I have had people tell me that the moon is computing its orbit as it moves around the earth.
Thanks. That is a lot clearer than J-Mac put it. I really had no idea what he was trying to tell us with his tomathematics.
So we are talking about the fact that plants, like other living organisms, have the ability to respond to external cues and adapt, right?
So do plants actually make decisions in your opinion? Also, given that the plasticity must have a genetic basis, why couldn’t it be subject to natural selection?
Ask your friend in the sky, he can turn dust into people, you know
Then explain the third option? Is it in the book by Futuyma?
Is the third option-It just is?
Hey, J-Mac …… My legs are able to do the calculations needed to exactly fill in the distance between my hips and the ground !
And they recompute it while I am walking around !
How about that !
OK, I was being deliberately silly.
But there are many examples of simple
adaptations that give the illusion that the
organism is doing mathematics. There
are lots of examples of animals, protists,
or even bacteria that can move uphill
in a chemical gradient which indicates
the presence of food. These work by
simple mechanisms (search Wikipedia
for “Chemotaxis”) which do not involve
doing any manipulation of equations to
compute derivatives of the concentration.
🙂
Leaving alone the astounding amount of misconceptions concentrated in the OP, I don’t understand why would anybody think that calculation abilities make evolution (again, evolution is not the same as Darwinism!) impossible. After all, some of us humans perform “sophisticated” calculations, yet we’re not excluded from the evolutionary processes.
Serendipity is now a scientific term in evolutionary theory. But it probably has some esoteric meaning unrelated to how the term is actually used in normal language.
Well, going from a false dichotomy to a false trichotomy is a tiny bit of an advance.
ETA: I suspect that, effectively, the many other options are in the textbook by Futuyma.
You know this because you did the math?
Until we can name the third option, maybe its best to just stick with the two.
There’s always another option. “We don’t know the answer to this yet, so let’s think of ways we could find out”.
Migratory birds must do complicated math as they are very punctual for their departures…though it is already known that the equations of quantum superposition of photons are not the only math they do to calculate the changes of day length…
When scientists artificially kept the day length constant, birds still knew it was time to migrate…
Quantum navigation is another examples how migratory birds do sophisticated equations though probably not same way Joe’s rock does…😉
ETA: John Harshman, avian paleontologist, is an expert in birdie navigation, though the last time we talked he turned out to be more of a speculative evolutionary science believer rather than experimental one…birdie elevation system convergent evolution is not his favorite…😉
See how quickly they abandon parsimony when it suits them?
Haha. Alan, if that were the case, then there would NEVER be a dichotomy, because someone can always say, the third choice is unknown.
Did you kill that man or not?
False dichotomy!
How so?
The there is another possibility, its just unknown!
Did you go to the movies last night or not?
False dichotomy!
Is that a can of tuna or not?
False dichotomy!
Yes, they also abandon the idea that life happened arbitrarily. Now if they can just figure out what to replace that idea with.
In that case someone else! Come on phoodoo, It’s the old Sherlock Holmes argument. Eliminate all possibilities you can and you must choose the one left.
Unless you haven’t thought of them all!!!
Cats have to solve complicated differential equations..
An illusion? How many illusions do Darwinists have? Why not call it evollusion?😆
An adaptation by devolution, perhaps? Behe will jump on it if you don’t clarify it…😉
If we can’t even say what those possibilities are, how can we eliminate them?
Your honor, we have five suspects in the murder of Mr. Collins.
Who are the suspects?
We have no idea.
Really? Just as many as the amount of misconceptions that Darwinists apply to keep the long dead Darwinism on life support?
Tell us more how an ideology never dies…🤔
We have DNA! And CCTV!
phoodoo,
Then how do you know there are five suspects?
Well, how do you know there aren’t?
Charlie M supports a 3rd option in the posts immediately above your own. Yet you never argue. Strange, that.
I’m not convinced you understand parsimony, on that showing.
Can you show the actual computations for the quantum superposition of photons the ducks do, curious to see the math.
-How can you be sure its DNA from the murderer?
-We can’t. We can’t even be sure its DNA your honor.
-What do you mean?
-Could just be a bottlerocket. Or something else entirely.
-Like what?
-No idea.
He either understands it or he doesn’t.
Or maybe a third possibility.
OK, let’s play ‘Lucky Accident or God? I’ll give a list of phenomena and … well, I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out.
1) The genetic composition of a specific gamete.
2) A fertilised female bird gets blown by a storm to an island lacking competitors.
3) Your mother meets your father.
4) An active transposon duplicates.
5) The yield of ‘domesticated’ rice increases when compared to ancestral wild varieties.
6) A protistan parasite develops resistance to chloroquine.
7) A bacterium develops the ability to grow on citrate in one lineage.
8) (follow-on from 3) A specific sperm (one of a couple hundred million) meets a specific egg ( one of 7 million or so whose haploid composition was set while Mom was still a foetus) and out pops phoodoo.
9) A zebra with a genetic metabolic disorder gets caught by lions. Others escape.
10) The shape of a given snowflake.
You only have 2 choices … apparently. Justify your answers. Feel free to use ‘parsimony’ (chortle).
Clever. You’re on fire.
Allan Miller,
Of course if Charlie’s playing, it’s ‘Lucky Accident or God or Inherent Wisdom’. But there are, paradoxically, still only 2 choices. The third is a figment of the imagination. But which?
And don’t forget to use parsimony, which now apparently means ‘consider the least number of competing hypotheses’. I don’t often say ‘ROFL’, but I will indulge myself on this occasion. ROFL.
I recognize that jmac believes the prestigious journal Huffington Pos,t that he references in his OP, as being the end all source for cutting edge scientific research I was still able to track down the published article (linked below). Given his scorn for ‘speculative’ science I was hoping to get his/her thoughts on the assumptions that the authors made in this piece of cutting edge science.
here are a few I quickly gleaned from the article:
What do you think of these speculations, jmac? Should the authors research be soundly criticized for utilization of the entirely speculative ‘time molecule” whose existence and identification is wholly in the realm of the imagination? How about the complete dependence on models as a basis for their conclusions? Inquiring minds want to know, jmac…..wadda ya say?
I must now take a break and allow my hepatocytes to finish their mathematical calculations on how to adjust their rate of metabolism for the elimination of the acetaldehyde responsible for my headache this morning!
What a howler of a publication:
Arabidopsis plants perform arithmetic division to prevent starvation at night
https://elifesciences.org/articles/00669