I read this on Mohler’s site a bit ago. What a riot! My wife and I had some friends over tonight and enjoyed some great beef from murdered cows, murdered potatoes, grapes, green beans, and home-made chocolate chip cookies that were made from all kinds of murdered lower food groups.
It’s great to enjoy what God has provided - and called clean.
Received with thanks to God - it’s good. I trust you enjoyed your carrot and pray it was not Maurice, the intelligent carrot from “Pinky and the Brain” :-)
Great fodder for self righteous vegans
I say, didn’t Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard do some work in that area?
I forget what conclusions he came to.
From wiki:
“The notion that plants are capable of feeling emotions was first recorded in 1848, when Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German professor, suggested the idea in his book Nanna. He believed that plants are capable of emotions, just like humans or animals, and that one could promote healthy growth by showering plants with talk, attention, and affection.[1]
One of the first to research the concept was the Indian scientist Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, who began to conduct experiments on plants in the year 1900. He found that every plant and every part of a plant appeared to have a sensitive nervous system and responded to shock by a spasm just as an animal muscle does. One visitor to his laboratory, the vegetarian playwright George Bernard Shaw, was intensely disturbed upon witnessing a demonstration in which a cabbage had violent convulsions as it boiled to death.[citation needed] Bose found that the effect of manures, drugs, and poisons could be determined within minutes, providing plant control with a new precision. In addition, Bose found that plants grew more quickly amidst pleasant music and more slowly amidst loud noise or harsh sounds. He also claimed that plants can “feel pain, understand affection etc.,” from the analysis of the nature of variation of the cell membrane potential of plants, under different circumstances. According to him, a plant treated with care and affection gives out a different vibration compared to a plant subjected to torture. In conclusion, he said: “Do not these records tell us of some property of matter common and persistent? That there is no abrupt break, but a uniform and continuous march of law?”[citation needed]
Bose in his laboratory
Bose in his laboratory
Bose’s experiments stopped at this conclusion, but Cleve Backster, an American scientist, conducted research that led him to believe that plants can communicate with other lifeforms. Backster’s interest in the subject began in February 1966, when Backster wondered if he could measure the rate at which water rises from a philodendron’s root area into its leaves. Because a polygraph or ‘lie detector’ can measure electrical resistance, and water would alter the resistance of the leaf, he decided that this was the correct instrument to use. After attaching a polygraph to one of the plant’s leaves, Backster claimed that, to his immense surprise, “the tracing began to show a pattern typical of the response you get when you subject a human to emotional stimulation of short duration”.
Led by curiosity, Backster went in search of other reactions, and decided to burn a leaf of the plant. Apparently, while he was musing upon this, there was a dramatic upward sweep in the tracing pattern. He had not moved or even touched the plant. Backster was certain that he had somehow inspired fear in the plant with his decision to burn it. He came to the resolution that, if he was correct, plants can not only feel things, but can also, in effect, read people’s minds.
In the United Kingdom, the Bognor Regis Electronic Development Corporation of Sussex conducted a similar experiment. The Corporation found that their secretaries were much too busy to care for their plants, and, following the death of several of the plants through lack of water, they attached some electrodes to the plant. They reportedly discovered that the plants emitted sounds that came out through loudspeakers as mournful cries when they were in need of watering.
In 1975, three scientists (K.A. Horowitz, D.C. Lewis, and E.L. Gasteiger) published an article in Science with their results when repeating Backster’s investigation of plant response to the killing of brine shrimp in boiling water. In this investigation, the researchers took into consideration control factors such as grounding the plants to reduce electrical interference and rinsing the plants to remove dust particles. Three of five pipettes contained brine shrimp while the remaining two only had water. These acted as a control because the pipettes were delivered to the boiling water at random. In addition, this investigation used a total of 60 brine shrimp deliveries to boiling water while Backster’s investigation had 13. While this experiment did show a few positive correlations, they did not occur at a rate great enough to be considered statistically viable. These experimental conditions were more rigorous from a traditional scientific paradigm and did not produce the same results, however Backster himself criticized them for misunderstanding certain fundamentals of primary perception (e.g. the time spent rinsing the plants affected their relationship to the experimenters).
More recently, the television show MythBusters performed an experiment aiming to either verify or disprove the concept. The tests were done by connecting plants to a polygraph’s galvanometer, and then employing both actual and imagined harm upon the plants, or upon others in the plant’s vicinity. The galvanometer showed some readings which surprised the researchers initially (showing some kind of reaction about one third of the time). Later experiments, which used an EEG for greater accuracy, failed to detect anything unusual. When the presenters used a machine that dropped eggs randomly into boiling water, the plant had no reaction whatsoever. The show concluded that the theory was bogus.”
Made for a great Stevie Wonder album though.
I have a radical con clusion of my own--Time to take the RoundUp to my patch of Swiss chard.
That ought to show the little pack of bankers and watchmakers.
Another “Celery is People, Too” alert!
Nah. I'll respect his dogma of bio-diversity rights for our chlorophyllic brethren and sisteren, and go stab down another chunk of that delicious corned beef brisket the wife fixed for dinner. Apologies in advance for getting a little randomly slaughtered, victimized cabbage mixed in with it.
“living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive.”
Unless they are babies.
Good lord, they’re going to try to turn us all into raw food fruitatarians.
One of my favorite bumperstickers:
Vegetarians: You People Suck! --The Plants
(Whatever happened to the Nutty Right-wing Anti-Hippie Bumper Sticker Company, anyway?)