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Old 31-08-2013, 05:07 PM posted to bionet.plants
Haines Brown Haines Brown is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Aug 2013
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Default culture in plants

I just read Gillies' review of Popper's book A World of Propensities. A
point made by Popper is that plants have "knowledge". Gillies disagrees,
but I believe it is because the word knowledge is ambivalent, referring
broadly to a) persistent information based on past experience, or b)
culturally transmitted information or theoretical knowledge.

I have material on plant memory, and it seems clear that plants can be
informed by past experience that informs future behavior. However, I
wonder about plants having "culture".

If culture were defined very broadly as the transmission of signals
between individual plants that affect the recipient's behavior, I would
appreciate knowing of any scholarly work on the subject. Such a
transmission would probably require a vehicle, and plants I suppose (out
of ignorance) do communicate with such things as pollen and perhaps in
the ground through proteins or even through bactria, which can be
transmitters of information from one entity to another. Can anyone cite
material on any such protein or bacterial communication between plants?

Haines Brown