Do plants move?

[xyrafhoan]

Plants are definitely living organisms. They respond to external stimuli, except they are much more subtle. The vast majority of plants obviously wither and die without sunlight and water, and make efforts to keep themselves in the sun. They have respiratory functions, which may synthesize energy differently from people, but they need energy to sustain themselves. Plants also possess reproductive organs and have evolved to have external forces help them spread their genetic material around. Plants also suffer from disease and can die if left untreated. Motion is such an arbitrary factor in whether something is living or not compared to reproductive cycles and the need to produce and consume energy.

 

[StBishop]

Mrs Nerg? I thought it was Mrs Gren.

M Movement
R Respiration
S Sensitivity

G Growth
R Reproduction
E Excretion
N Nutrition

I would say the saying is flawed before any matter. What happened to the I for intelligence? Mrs Gren or Nerg can explain a car for example.

Cars grow? Cars Reproduce?

(There are cars which turn on their windscreen wipers and headlights based on water and light, they're now "sensitive" in some instances).

OT: I am a final year education student, science is my minor. I've taught junior highschool science (7-10). Mrs Gren is comprehensive enough for almost all instances that a regular person would encounter.

Plants move. There's not really a debate to have is there?

I'm not discouraging people from questioning the mnemonic, I just don't see the apparent flaw.

Mrs nerg can explain cars? Cars can reproduce? Cars can Grow?

Viruses do not move. Can Mrs Gren explain that?

It's a simple question; does everything need the same qualities to classed as alive? Another question; would a highly evolved AI be classed as living?

Well done, you found a very interesting example of one reason why science is awesome. It is perpetually imperfect. We constantly find flaws in our current knowledge base and look to fix them. The issue here isn't so much with Mrs. Gren (it's the best tool for it's purpose right now) but with our understanding of life.

Once we understand life better, we can work on Mrs. Gren.

?Whether or not viruses should be regarded as
organisms is a matter of taste.?
? French Nobel laureate André Lwoff, 1962

?A virus is a virus!?
?Lwoff, 1959

"Nevertheless, most evolutionary biologists hold that because
viruses are not alive, they are unworthy of serious consideration
when trying to understand evolution. They also
look on viruses as coming from host genes that somehow
escaped the host and acquired a protein coat. In this view, viruses
are fugitive host genes that have degenerated into parasites.
And with viruses thus dismissed from the web of life,
important contributions they may have made to the origin
of species and the maintenance of life may go unrecognized.
Because viruses occupy a netherworld between life
and non-life, they can pull off some remarkable feats.
Consider, for instance, that although viruses ordinarily
replicate only in living cells, they also have the capacity to
multiply, or ?grow,? in dead cells and even to bring them back to
life. Amazingly, some viruses can even spring back
to their ?borrowed life? after being destroyed."
Villarreal, L.P. (2004)

Most bacteria don't have self-propelled motion either, they only move because things move them, and science is fairly confident that bacteria is alive.

Are you sure? I was under the impression that most bacteria are motile and that only some aren't.
That said, I could be very wrong.

 

[MetalMagpie]

I have never heard of this either.

I mean, are we arguing that corals and other animals that just stay in one place are not animals then?

Isn't it viruses people disagree on whether they are alive or not?

Corals do move (for one thing, they release eggs), they just don't relocate once they've landed somewhere. In order for Mrs Gren to work out, you need to take "move" as broadly as possible.

But yes, viruses are the tricky one as they really don't fit Mrs Gren. My teacher was firmly of the opinion that it's silly to pretend there's some sort of concrete line between living and non-living things. After all, living things developed from non-living things, so it's reasonable to assume that (at least in theory) you can have a continuous spectrum between the two.

Yeah, that's the crazy part to think about. The components of living things, of humans even, aren't really that special. We're composed of the same atoms, and molecules and chemicals as so many other non-living things on the planet. The only real difference is that in our case, those materials have arranged themselves in various complex ways that allow the biological functions to occur.

If you really want to get trippy, think about cells. Every single cell in the human body is a living thing. They can sense changes in the environment around them, move, respirate, reproduce, etc. In a way, humans (and all other lifeforms of course) aren't really singular organisms. Yes, we're each individual consciousnesses in control of individual bodies... but when you think about it, we're also composite organisms of millions of individual, simpler lifeforms working in unison.

It gets better. The mitochondria that live inside our cells have their own separate DNA!

 

[MetalMagpie]

I have never heard of this either.

I mean, are we arguing that corals and other animals that just stay in one place are not animals then?

Isn't it viruses people disagree on whether they are alive or not?

Corals do move (for one thing, they release eggs), they just don't relocate once they've landed somewhere.

So... Like plants?

Exactly. I still remember how astonished I was when I first found out that corals are animals, not plants. (Although what really blew me away was finding out that fungi aren't plants either!)

But yes, viruses are the tricky one as they really don't fit Mrs Gren. My teacher was firmly of the opinion that it's silly to pretend there's some sort of concrete line between living and non-living things. After all, living things developed from non-living things, so it's reasonable to assume that (at least in theory) you can have a continuous spectrum between the two.

Yeah, that's how biologists I know tend to look at it.
But they also do like to argue whether viruses are alive or not, but it's more about what our definition of 'life' should be. (I've heard arguments that computer-viruses should be considered 'alive')
But I haven't realised people commonly think plants aren't alive.

Yeah, I wasn't aware that anyone tries to argue that plants aren't alive... :/

Arguing how words like "life", "gender", "sentience", etc. should be defined is really interesting because I think the discussion says a lot about how we relate to those concepts.

We seem to most easily define "life" as "something related to us" (in biological terms) and "sentience" as "something that thinks like us". So it's possible/probable that most people would be reluctant to classify a super-advanced piece of software as "alive" or "sentient", because there's no biological connection and computers don't "think" the same way we do.

 

[spacecowboy86]

I was always taught that movement was not an indicator of life, and when I brought it up in class the teacher responded with "I hope you mean self propelled movement, because you know rocks can move too if influenced by other forces." Regardless, even after clarifying, I was still told that movement is not a necessary indicator of life.

And now I'll leave the deeper arguing to those with a passion for biology.

Cool time-lapses though! I think they're epic. ^_^

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Of course, fucking triffids man.

On a slightly more serious note, some of them kinda wobble towards light, and some of them like venus flytraps can kinda move. So, sort of.

 

[rcs619]

I have never heard of this either.

I mean, are we arguing that corals and other animals that just stay in one place are not animals then?

Isn't it viruses people disagree on whether they are alive or not?

Corals do move (for one thing, they release eggs), they just don't relocate once they've landed somewhere. In order for Mrs Gren to work out, you need to take "move" as broadly as possible.

But yes, viruses are the tricky one as they really don't fit Mrs Gren. My teacher was firmly of the opinion that it's silly to pretend there's some sort of concrete line between living and non-living things. After all, living things developed from non-living things, so it's reasonable to assume that (at least in theory) you can have a continuous spectrum between the two.

Yeah, that's the crazy part to think about. The components of living things, of humans even, aren't really that special. We're composed of the same atoms, and molecules and chemicals as so many other non-living things on the planet. The only real difference is that in our case, those materials have arranged themselves in various complex ways that allow the biological functions to occur.

If you really want to get trippy, think about cells. Every single cell in the human body is a living thing. They can sense changes in the environment around them, move, respirate, reproduce, etc. In a way, humans (and all other lifeforms of course) aren't really singular organisms. Yes, we're each individual consciousnesses in control of individual bodies... but when you think about it, we're also composite organisms of millions of individual, simpler lifeforms working in unison.

It gets better. The mitochondria that live inside our cells have their own separate DNA!

Oh yeah! I nearly forgot about that. If I remember right, one of the theories regarding mitochondria is that they were originally some sort of independent single-celled organisms. Like, bacteria or something. But at some point, they began to bond with other cells in a symbiotic relationship. To the point where they eventually became an integral part of all the cells that descended from the original symbiotic pairings.

Nature is amazing

 

[Olas]

Of course plants move, and they meet essentially all requirements for life. If you're talking about sentience that's a whole different matter.

Viruses are the ones straddling the brink of what we consider life.