Demonstrating Plant Roots and brains?

2 back-back interesting articles about research that has found that roots act like brains, about slime that changed its growth pattern to grow towards food.

Which in an oblique way opens the mind to the possibility of holistic theory, viz., that whole extracts of plants carry intelligent information to the whole human which is why they are capable of treating the body's imbalances.

Excerpted:
“The tip of the root (of plants) acts like the brain of one of the lower animals,” Darwin said.
Roots that act like brains? Does this mean plants have memory? Collect data, store it, interpret it, and then act on it, in constantly changing, dynamic situations? This sounds so perilously close to words and phrases associated with humans, such as “thinking,” “intelligence,” and “decision making,” that science shied away from anything that suggested plant life could be sentient.

In modern times, molecular biologists focused on DNA as the single template from which all life was fashioned and maintained.

However, with their mapping of the human genome as we entered the 21st Century, they discovered that humans carry only about 25,000 protein-coding genes. This was startling, because the simple nematode worm has about 19,000 such genes — and the human body is immeasurably more complex than a worm’s. So, why didn’t humans have a lot more protein-coding genes — genes that instruct proteins what to do?

To find answers, molecular biologists had to revise their notions of the genetic code. They knew that a huge number of genes in the human genome — making up more than 98 per cent of the genome — don’t code protein. These, they had previously dismissed as evolutionary leftovers, or junk DNA.

In an enormous turnaround, they began looking at these non-coding genes more closely and discovered they were not junk after all. They had an extremely important function.

A key to the mystery lay in the nature of complexity. There was no doubt protein-coding DNA was capable of creating complexity. It could issue instructions for creating the legions of proteins that, in the case of humans, make up half their dry weight. But regulating the process was another matter. Without regulation, the results would be mostly chaotic.

In addition, as the complexity of organisms increased, the amount of regulation that was needed increased exponentially. (To become technical, it increased as a quadratic function, which means it increased by the square of the number of genes in the organism.)

Regulation, it turns out, is the job of RNA (ribonucleic acid), located in the nucleus of cells along with DNA. It’s from the so-called junk DNA that RNA gets regulatory instructions.

This revelation opened the intellectual floodgates, and put to rest the notion that life was ruled by a robotic DNA ritually coding proteins, much like a machine stamping out widgets.

Once regulation became a new focus, it raised the question: How does internal regulation adapt to constantly changing external conditions? Or, in the case of plants, how do they respond to changes in their surroundings?

There are 15 to 20 things that plants monitor — including weather conditions, light, calcium and aluminum availability, locations of other plants, electrical fields, chemical signals, smells, and waves of all kinds. In addition, they have remarkable capacities for communication. For instance, when infected by pathogens, they can release airborne volatiles, warning neighbouring plants to beef up their immune systems.

Seven years ago, however, a simple experiment demonstrated that a plant can identify the shortest route to food in a maze, prompting researchers to conclude that, “This remarkable process of cellular (analysis) implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence.”

The plant was one of the lower fungi, a slime mould, which is a thin organism that spreads across cool, shady, moist places. There are 550 different species of this type of mould in a variety of colours, some of them spectacularly beautiful. The experiment, led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki at the Bio-Mimetic Control Research Centre in Nagoya, Japan, is reported in Nature, 2000, 407:470.

Initially, the slime occupied all the paths in the maze, but within eight hours, it had identified the shortest path to the food, and had withdrawn from all other paths. Thus, said the researchers, it had “maximize(d) its foraging efficiency, and therefore its chances of survival.”