The giant viruses might infect algae that are increasing Greenland’s ice melt. These viruses could help kill off the damaging algal blooms, helping to reduce some of the impacts of climate change.
The article you linked to is about suppressyn, an originally viral protein that’s been integrated in human DNA and is as far as I know only expressed in placenta. There suppressyn helps fight viral infections by competing with some families of viruses for the binding of a membrane receptor (ASCT2) that these viruses use as a way to recognize and attach themselves to target cells.
It seems NCLDV infects unicellular algae and protists, with at least some of the family members relying on phagocytosis by the host, and many of them displaying fibrils on their particles. And though the binding mechanisms probably differ between different viruses of the NCLDV family, I really doubt these host organisms express ASCT2.
Oh we already know this. There are parts of the genome that, if even slightly changed, cause terrible, terrible things.
Mutations can happen anywhere, but serious mutations (that may affect the basic things a cell needs to do in order to exist) result in cell death and therefore don’t manifest in the population — the population continues on as though the mutation had never existed.
In this way, natural selection conserves some parts of the genome while less essential parts can vary more freely without being deleterious to the organism.
For example, most non-bacteria (including all plants, animals, fungi, protists) have special proteins called histones. Histones are used to package the DNA together and wrap it all up. Cells can’t function at all without a these proteins, and the most important histone proteins evolve so slowly that they’re almost identical between a human and a pea. (Humans and peas shared a common ancestor over half a billion years ago.)
ETA: My molecular biology knowledge is rusty, but IIRC the way DNA is packaged and unpackaged can also reduce or increase the risk of DNA being exposed to potential mutagens. So if it’s wrapped up, it’s harder to access and tamper with
This isn’t that uncommon, it’s just really hard for it to survive into reproduction. Protists are notorious for it, this one alone has at least three separate bacterial symbiotes and even replaced it’s own mitochondria(which themselves are endosymbiotic bacteria) with another bacteria, essentially reinventing the fucking wheel: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixotricha_paradoxa
Oof, what a read :/ I’m very familiar with plants as I’ve studied them for years. Please don’t take this article serious. I wish there was more research communication of how cool plants are and how they function/live. But this article is not the way to go. This is pseudoscience. Most of this is just twisting words to sound nice without any real understanding underneath. The following are my thoughts while I read the article:
Interesting read, although when I stumbled upon this I started to have doubts: “a skill that surely helped on the savannah when we had to recognize a tiger hiding in the bushes from just a few broken stripes.” There were and are no tigers in Africa where humans evolved. Why use such a obviously bullshit example? The author automatically discredits themself.
The rest of the article doesn’t get better, often talking in suggestive language like “so the plants know which way is up”. What does know mean in this context? The author implies that there is some knowing consciousness in plants. “They can distinguish self from non-self, stranger from kin.” Oh really? Is this really what they are doing? Or are these maybe just responses to various environmental pressures (which are different if there are plants of the same species around)?
“Plants chat among themselves and with other species. They release volatile organic compounds with a lexicon, Calvo says, of more than 1,700 “words”—allowing them to shout things that a human might translate as “caterpillar incoming” or “*$@#, lawn mower!”” OK, we’ve reached pure anthropomorphism now. I could write the same text about smart home computers communicating with each other suggesting that they are conscious and have feelings. This only distorts the whole discussion of how we could think of plant consciousness differently from animal consciousness. But that’s what the article tried to do in the first place, isn’t it?
“If a plant could respond to sensory information on a one-to-one basis—when the light does x, the plant does y—it would be fair to think of plants as mere automatons, operating without thought, without a point of view. But in real life, that’s never the case. Like all organisms, plants are immersed in dynamic, precarious environments, forced to confront problems with no clear solutions, betting their lives as they go.” OK, so they are much more complex systems than mere “stimulus in, reflex out” sort of system. But why does this conclude anything? They could be highly skilled, adaptable automatons? Like computers.
And then they try to reverse argue the following “If the representational theory of the mind says that plants can’t perform intelligent, cognitive behaviors, and the evidence shows that plants do perform intelligent, cognitive behaviors, maybe it’s time to rethink the theory.” Who said plants can perform intelligent, cognitive behaviors in the first place? The article by actual plant researchers you just dismissed without any arguments claims the opposite of that!
"So maybe we should question the very premise that neurons are needed for cognition at all.” Yes, I’m all up for that. But we need some basis for this discussion and just saying look plants are so cool! doesn’t cut it.
The article then spends a lot of time romanticizing plants like this “By using these flows to guide their movements, plants accomplish all kinds of feats, such as “shade avoidance”—steering clear of over-populated areas”. How is this different from a trained machine though?
“Machines are made—one and done—but living things make themselves, and they have to remake themselves so long as they want to keep living.” Maybe the real revelation is that plants are living beings and machines are not? Have you been defining life after all instead of conscious beings? Because what has been written about plants here certainly applies to fungi, bacteria, archaea and protists in some way or another. Even viruses adapt in some way, don’t they? But it would be much harder to argue for conscious bacteria. It’s probably easier for you to stick to plants.
“You’re organized to have a certain autonomy, and that immediately carves out a world or a domain of relevance.” Thompson calls this “life-mind continuity.” Or as Calvo puts it, echoing the 19th-century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, “Where there is life there is already mind.”” Oh OK, let’s just define life = mind and we’re done with the discussion altogether.
Well, back to plants: “They don’t have brains, but according to Calvo they have something just as good: complex vascular systems, with networks of connections arranged in layers not unlike a mammalian cortex.” This whole thing reads like someone has never thought much of plants and discovered how fascinating they are. And now they try to prove how cool they are by relating them to humans with some loose facts they picked up. Wait till you learn about how ingenious photosynthesis is and how clever C4 and CAM plants are…
This section “As Calvo sums it up, “They can count to five!”” is just further confusing human behavior with plants. How do you know they count to five and not just use some change in chemical/electrical gradients to determine that enough hairs have been triggered? This is just bullshitting the reader into thinking plants are conscious.
““Clearly,” Thompson says, “plants are self-organizing, self-maintaining, self-regulating, highly adaptive, they engage in complex signaling among each other, within species and across species, and they do that within a framework of multicellularity that’s different from animal life but exhibits all the same things: autonomy, intelligence, adaptivity, sense-making.”” OK, we are past the point where they even try discussing anything in depth and just say how cool plants are, therefore they are conscious. No shit, all life forms (except probably viruses) are self-organizing, self-maintaining, self-regulating, highly adaptive organisms who interact with the world in complex ways. Just because you use some cool sounding words you don’t prove anything.
I’m curious what these people will say when they discover that half the human body is actually non-human cells who also self-organize, self-maintain and self-regulate. The billion consciousnesses of the human body!! We are connected to everything through our uber-consciousness!
“They have no private, conscious worlds locked up inside them. But according to 4E cognitive science, neither do we. “The mistake was to think that cognition was in the head,” Calvo says. “It belongs to the relationship between the organism and its environment.”” This is interesting. So our consciousness is not in our head not even inside us but in our interaction with our environment? Nice philosophical thought experiment but how does this translate to our real world? Not really. Maybe we shouldn’t use personal pronouns altogether and stop thinking of us as individuals because we are not distinct subjects. We are only subjects in the relation to our environment! What?!
The end of the article makes nearly a good point just to dive further into anthropomorphism again: “But more to the point, the plants appeared to me now not as objects, but as subjects—as living, striving beings trying to make it in the world—and I found myself wondering whether they felt lonely in their pots, or panicked when I forgot to water them, or dizzy when I rotated them on the windowsill.” You were so close. Yes, plants are obviously not just lifeless objects!! Who would have thought? Is this the revelation of the article? But why then anthropomorphize them in the same breath? This is sooo frustrating to read!
This whole article is basically just semantics with pseudoscience and some scientific facts about plants sprinkled in.
Slime mold is a protist not fungi :0. I’m just being a jerk here doesn’t matter lol. I love the slime molds they’re so cool I always liked having them in the lab each year as a teaching tool. Definitely venom
When a microbe was found munching on a plastic bottle in a rubbish dump, it promised a recycling revolution. Now scientists are attempting to turbocharge those powers in a bid to solve our waste crisis. But will it work?
…this would be straight up hypoxia, aka oxygen deprivation
I have a scuba certification. I know what nitrogen narcosis is. @protist is clearly not talking about nitrogen narcosis. They’re describing what would actually happen in the case of being forced to breathe pure nitrogen, which is straight up suffocation.
suffocation
noun
death caused by not having enough oxygen, or the act of killing someone by not allowing them to have enough oxygen –Cambridge Dictionary
In protist comment the “this…” after nitrogen narcosis is meant to indicate a change of topic to the OP. As in “X is boring this is pod racing. “ it’s ambiguous and a semi colon could have probably avoided this confusion. Or even just “what op is describing is”. Not that I think his comment is necessarily correct.
Study: 83% of Americans will have to work into their 70s in order to afford to retire (medium.com)
Giant viruses discovered living in Greenland's dark ice and red snow | Live Science (www.livescience.com)
The giant viruses might infect algae that are increasing Greenland’s ice melt. These viruses could help kill off the damaging algal blooms, helping to reduce some of the impacts of climate change.
What possible, fundamental, misunderstanding of the nature of the universe could make current academics look like flat earthers?
Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event (Last time this happened, Earth got plants) (newatlas.com)
From the article:...
land shrimp (mander.xyz)
mycology (mander.xyz)
What are these plants called? (lemmy.world)
We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world (www.theguardian.com)
When a microbe was found munching on a plastic bottle in a rubbish dump, it promised a recycling revolution. Now scientists are attempting to turbocharge those powers in a bid to solve our waste crisis. But will it work?
Know your shits! (i.imgur.com)
(Shamelessly stolen from an imgur dump, but I felt like it belongs here)...
Alabama wants to be the 1st state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe only nitrogen (abcnews.go.com)
Alabama is seeking to become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen....
Is jellyfish vegan?
They don’t have a brain really and kinda just float there. Do they even feel pain?