Alaskan Range: The Known And The Unknown
"Many people apparently don't know they don't know the proper way to open a banana. According to a recent Slate.com article by Steven Landsburg, peeling from the stem down is the common banana opening method. However, opening it from the bottom is the preferred technique of monkeys, assuredly the world's foremost banana-accessing experts,'' writes Greg Hill, then goes on to consider whether or not plants have feelings.
Starting to write one of these columns is reminiscent of when the famous rocketeer, Werner von Braun, said, "Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." So it makes sense, sort of, to begin this one by considering the new studies of why people are fascinated with literature. It's described in a NY Times article titled "Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know," from last April. The article looks at how literary scholars and psychologists are using brain imaging technology studying the reading brain "to answer fundamental questions about literature's very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why we are so passionate about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?"
Researchers at the Haskins Laboratory in New Haven, CT are using this approach to find ways to improve college-level reading skills. They've learned that "humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time … For example, the proposition "Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate" is not too hard to follow. Add a fourth level, though, and it's suddenly more difficult." Comprehension drops by 60 percent when a fifth level is added, and some Modernist authors expect readers to track six or more mental states.
Like Donald Rumsfeld once pointed out, "There are knowns … There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
Many people apparently don't know they don't know the proper way to open a banana. According to a recent Slate.com article by Steven Landsburg, peeling from the stem down is the common banana opening method. However, opening it from the bottom is the preferred technique of monkeys, assuredly the world's foremost banana-accessing experts.
Banana stems are actually on the bottom, since they grow upwards, so the monkeys are really opening the tops. One benefit of this approach is that it produces fewer phloem bundles, better known as the strings that dangle from bananas after peeling. The purpose of the strings, according to the banana people at ChiquitaFruitBites.com, is that these phloem bundles "are part of the system that carries nutrition to all parts of the banana."
Now that you know that, maybe you're ready to tackle a hard one: do plants have feelings, too? Many vegetarians cite their reluctance to consume creatures that think, but now scientists are exploring how plants experience life. I came across a NY Times article from last December titled "Sorry Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too" that has much food for thought. "When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants 'forage' for resources like light and soil nutrients. By analyzing the ration of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground 'rhyzosphere' and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade. 'Plants are not silly,' said Monika Hilker of the Free University of Berlin. 'They respond to tactile cues, they recognize differenct wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk' through chemical signals … these are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals."
Certain plants ward off invasive insects by producing "volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragonflies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within. "Some plants can sense insect eggs being laid on their leaves and "sprout carpets of tumorlike neoplasms to knock the eggs off, or secrete ovicides to kill them, or sound the SOS."
So plants know more than we knew. That's OK with this librarian, who seems to learn of more things he doesn't know daily and realizes there'd be few librarians if everybody already knew everything. Besides, as playwright Harold Pinter asked, "Apart from the known and the unknown, what is there?"
