Square roots? Scientists say plants are good at math

Ludicrous claims like this, which are more shameless PR than anything else, do nothing to advance the cause of science – and uncritical reporting by the scientifically illiterate media compounds the problem.

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.

“”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.”

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.

Nonsense. Plants do not do maths, any more than people do maths when trying to catch a ball moving on a certain trajectory.

Need to read original publication for details, but if the author(s) are mathematicians and not botanists, they probably overlooked the fact that plants close stomata at night (except CAM plants). Thus, there is probably a self-limiting metabolism of starch as the internal atmosphere is depleted of O2 and concomitant increase in CO2

Basic probability theory.

I sat next to a vegetable in algebra and I can tell you they can’t do math.

FYI – The “Wonder”, that “We” have still to “Understand” – in “Everyone’s” life on Earth Planet!

This just in ‘Plants have more intellectual capacity then the modern-day American Conservative’.