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Square roots? Scientists say plants are good at math
Spring buds are silhouetted against the rising full moon in Washington, March 19, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/Hyungwon Kang
LONDON |
LONDON (Reuters) - 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.
"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.
"Understanding how plants continue to grow in the dark could help unlock new ways to boost crop yield."
(Reporting by Nigel Hunt; editing by Keiron Henderson)
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Of course plants do not do arithmetic any more than a dog catching a ball does calculus. It is interesting and possibly newsworthy that plants have been observed to have evolved such an effective mechanism for regulating starch consumption; there’s no need to spoil it with puerile anthropomorphism.
Well speaking as a computational chemist, this sounds like a load of nonsense. Methinks the folks in the field of computational biology would also find this statement problematic. Technically, EVERY biological process could be thought of as a product of a sophisticated arithmetic calculation. Actually, it is our algorithms that mimic or model life. If this guy is really a modeler, I doubt he would have said this.
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