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People only figured out the mechanics of plate tectonics relatively recently. However, they started noticing that the continents looked like they had fit together as soon as they had accurate maps to look at. In the late 1500’s
Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus … suggested that the Americas were “torn away from Europe and Africa … by earthquakes and floods” and went on to say: “The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].”
Exactly!
While the continents might look like they fit together, and the rock types and ages and fossils match at key points all down the coasts from Canada/Scotland all the way down to South America and South Africa, how on earth (sorry) would you explain how the continents are thousands of miles apart?
One theory posited the earth spinning so fast centrifugal forces ripped ehat would become the moon out of the Pacific, sucking Eurasia and America into the void.
That’s a Randall Monroe WhatIf if ever I saw one. Think of the energy involved! All life on earth would be extinct.
So these theories were laughed out of scientific court. Until Vine and Matthew’s seminal paper on magnetic stripes being mirrored over the mid ocean ridge showed there had to be something forcing the plates apart.
That’s cute honey, would you like an internet.
He says afroeurasia and the Americas are three continents, but these days we know they’re only two.
Um, no?
Continents are a social construct, with countless varying different definitions and groupings across the world.
They only say that because Europe can’t cope with being Asia’s elbow
You’re not a real boy, Europe, deal with it!
Hell yeah they are!
Alfred Wagner proposed the idea of plate tectonics decades before this, citing the fit of the continents, the same species of plants and animals on continents separated by ocean, and glacial striations as evidence. The problem was that no one knew HOW the plates separated.
He actually described the continents as scraping across an ancient and immobile seafloor. This was deemed mechanically implausible and contributed greatly to the rejection of Continental Drift. If Al stuck with his detailed phenomenological approach, there may have been wider adoption of his detailed and careful observations.
Source?
Well, am geophysicist for 20+ years, and I teach this stuff, but the best source I remember reading is “The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science” by Naomi Oreskes.
Roughly how often do you get enraged when you hear about people talking about parts of the world with certain energies?
Strange sensations referred to via vague metaphor? Absurd!
Plates that move? Psh, Id rather propose that a whole continent called Lemuria just vanished.
Plants do move. Have you never seen a dandelion blowing in the wind or an acorn fall from a tree.
I’M HIT! POW POW POW POW POW POW POW POW
But dandelions were unknown to the Americas until the Europeans brought them.
I remember the day I realized that Africa and South America fit together when looking at a paper atlas. It felt like I had just discovered something incredible. I guess I had, but I wasn’t the first. :-)
This happens a lot on mathematics, you figure out something that it’s looks incredible just to find out Euler already found it centuries ago.
That’s why they name things after the second person to discover it - Euler was inevitably the first.
Its always nice when it’s someone other than Euler
Darwin believed one of the more popular explanations of his time: expanding Earth theory. Basically, the planet was like an expanding dough ball. It decently explained why things looked like they fit together. Darwin even went out to Patagonia to investigate some cliffs, and basically “confirmed” the theory.
So Darwin was trying to explain how creatures with common lineage appeared both sides of an ocean. He “proved” that the land masses were once joined. He didn’t really care so much about “how” they were joined, but it was vital to his theory of evolution that they were.
Oh, definitely. It’s also worth noting that he definitely wasn’t a geologist, despite having an interest in it. I was mostly just mentioning it because there were theories trying to explain the similarities across landmasses before plate tectonics. We may not always be right about why, but we’re really good at noticing stuff like that (even when it doesn’t mean anything).
“yep, that pretty far”
Wouldn’t Darwin have already known that the Greeks had calculated the circumference of the earth like 2000 years before him?
A slow enough rate of expansion would make 2000 years negligible. Same with plate tectonics.
And like it was Darwin, I can give him a pass on not knowing the time scale of speciation
Deep time is so annoying. Here I am walking around thinking that I am the main event. And really I will be dead for decades in 1 855,000th of the amount of time from us to the dinosaurs. What the hell universe!? There shouldn’t be 855,000 human lifespans between us and a bunch of overgrown lizards-bird things.
That theory sounds bad, like the opposite problem we’ve currently got. Eventually it’d turn into mad max
I’m really bothered by this line of thinking.
Just because something “looks” like it is a certain way doesn’t mean it is. For anything to be considered fact there needs to be evidence. The hypothesis that the Earth may have plate tectonics existed decades before it became fact.
This leads people to make connections between completely unrelated things, despite scientists, or professionals working in fields of science (i.e. doctors), saying, and often proving, there is none.
Sure we are pattern matching machines. We had to be the humans that couldn’t figure out “big scary noise usually means big scary threat” died off.
My hat goes off to all the great minds in the sciences that can not only overcome this tendency but using it AT THE SAME TIME!
Consider eprime, english without “is”
“Garfield is a cat”: “Garfield belongs to the cat species”.
They had me until this one lmao
Garfield is
Garfield is but a figment of John’s delusions.
Using our understanding of the fundamental elements and atomic particles, we can create weapons capable of destroying the entire earth.
How was earth made though?
Fuck, we don’t know. We’ll stick with God.
I mean, figuring out how to destroy something is always easier than how to create
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After we are gone the cockroachs and plastic will rule this world… probably using Nokia brick phones from 2003 and driving Honda Civics
I do not know how to create bussy
Just make sure you keep it lubed and use it every day. It’ll turn into a bussy eventually.
It also took a climatologist or something and nobody believed him. Probably because a lot of science stubbornly gravitated around religious stupidity of some kind.
We call it “authoritarianism”.
It’s still dominant. Just the authorities have changed.
This is a story I am going to repeat forever.
When I was taking one of my science classes for my major our professor mentioned that she is pretty convinced that she was the last holdout geologist for this theory. So not only had this been discovered in recent history it was controversial in recent history.
bro, you dont need to post screenshots of twitter. just steal the post, no one cares.
But 𝕏crements are my favorite genre of meme
that’s why copy pasting is so satisfying. it’s shittyshitshitting all about.
Makes me wonder what other “obvious things” we don’t know yet
That wearing a mask reduces the spread of airborne diseases.
Continental drift had been proposed way before this. The mechanism was unknown.
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This is why when people laugh at me for saying things like trees have concsiousness, and are kinda racist, I dont care. Science needs to catch up to intuition sometimes and Im not good at math so Im not going to be able to prove that tree’s have a rudimentary form of cognition and intention.
Anyways, someone else already proved trees make decisions, cant remember where I read it but a big oak will feed baby oaks via root contact, and will feed certain other trees too, but not as much, because it favours its own species.
Biologist here. I promise I’m not laughing at you.
While I’d be a bit cautious about throwing around a word like “consciousness” without defining it, you’re absolutely right. Trees, and pretty much every living thing, are aware of their environment. They’re capable of communication and coordinated responses to threats. They have complex and intricate lifecycles and many levels of interactions with other plants and animals. One of the more profound passages I read (from Jurassic Park, whose author I otherwise detest) had the paleobotanist comment something along the lines that everyone sees plants as a background against which animals act, but they’re their own ecosystem, just as much red in tooth and claw (or cooperative, if you prefer) as any group of dinosaurs.
Being one of those weird theoretical biologists, I’d even let you get away with using a word like “intent” as long as we mean “a learned and stereotyped response to an environmental condition.” Oaks aren’t debating the meaning of life, and they’re not deciding in a sense more meaningful than an “if then else” kind of clause. I mean, I don’t think humans have free will either, so I’m not just ragging on trees here - but that’s a different conversation. They make decisions like “if it’s been warming up for a while and getting sunny, start making leaves again.” It’s genetic/evolutionary learning rather than neural, but it’s still learning. It’s just much slower.
It’s also not racist for oaks to feed other oaks any more than it’s racist for humans to eat corn. Or corn dogs.
I’m not going to get into the differences between group selection versus kin selection dynamics because that would break my New Year’s resolution.
Thank you for your information about your specialty and I found it very interesting. but also thank you for the info about Michael crichton! Your little offhand comment was the first I ever heard and so I searched, had no idea he was vocally against the science supporting global warming. Wild from an author that does scifi based on existing technology/theories and making it a horror thriller with mankind facing the consequences of their hubris.
AKA LIKE FUCKING CLIMATE CHANGE.
I know, right? I really liked him until I ended up working at the institute where he regularly interfaced to get some of his ideas. I knew the guy who was the basis for the character of Ian Malcolm - Jeff Goldblum’s character. He was an economist rather than a biologist, but the cool thing is that if you’re working in complex systems theory it doesn’t really matter.
Anyway, I think the book that turned me off was called Prey. It was something about nanotechnology and complex systems. It was just so completely wrong in every scientific detail that it was jarring. I could deal with the suspension of disbelief for things like Jurassic Park, but the grey goo stuff was just so far outside of established science that it made me look at all of his other writings.
I can still enjoy some of his works and some of the films made from them, but there’s always this aftertaste like I’m enjoying something from L Ron Hubbard, you know?
Thank you for taking the time to write such an informed response :)
I personaly belive their ‘thought proccess’ as limited as it is functions via the movement and increase/decrease of hormones. I think this because of how you can make marijuana plants do different things by adjusting their light cycles and ambient temperatures, or just blowing an oscillating fan over them and trimming them a certain way. That is just my uneducated guess
I definetly dont think trees are holding debate forums lol
Do you think bonsais in them little pots get lonely for other trees?
jesus dude. This reads like a LARP, and you missed the previous posts point entirely.
Trees have consciousness
I mean…
and are kinda racist
/facepalm
Would speciest have suited you better? Obviously trees dont know about our social construct of race
I just want to know how trees have any kind of bias that isn’t directly related to their needs for survival and growth.
OP feels it, science better catch up with this and you’ll see
Calling it racism kind of downplays the massive amount of genocide associated with actual racism.
What you explained is more like nepotism, which is rampant among the animal kingdom and beyond.
Im going to avoid saying that in the future, lesson learned
In a lot of cases it could also just be self preservation, a lot of these networks are basically nodes of a single organism which has reproduced through cloning for the express purpose of achieving these more extended intertwined root systems to have a wider range to pull water and nutrients from.
The world’s largest organism is one of these tree to tree networks.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-8922-1 ;)
Happy to share the pdf. Quanta also has a bunch of articles on plant “cognition.” They are very much living, aware beings.
Another fun fact is that some insects are capable of recognizing human faces. Their vision might actually be way better than ours and they’re not all that stupid. It just seems that way because their brains work fundamentally different to ours. Decades of bad science stemming from deeply rooted human supremacism have blinded us to the wonders of the natural world and we’re just starting to unravel all of that.
To be honest, it kind of makes me sad. Is the fresh totatoe I eat alive when I bite it?
Growing things are alive, that’s how they grow.
If it makes you feel better, many plants want their seeds to be eaten so they can be spread. Tomatoes are just a package around the seeds, the green stems are the plants ‘body’. It’s more like eating semen than eating a person.
I can get behind that
You could have just said that straight away. Not an issue for anyone on lemmy if you are into eating semen, you didn’t need say trees are racist
I was using our social construct of race as a (bad) metaphore for species selection when deciding how much to support other trees. But now a second person is digging at it, thats a sign for me to discard that descriptor in future conversations. And only plant semen for me please.
There’s a type of vegetarianism/veganism that only eats plants that “want” to be eaten. Specifically, many plants produce fruits that hold seeds. They make the fruits bright and tasty (which tbh usually means “sweet” but you get the point) so that animals will come along and eat them.
Plants have a problem. They can t walk. That means that any of their offspring are going to grow up right next to them, competing with them for resources. There’s a lot of different ways of dealing with this phenomenon, but one common way is for the plant to bribe an animal to move its seeds further away by wrapping it in something delicious. This is what happens with plants that depend on pollinators like bees - which give pollen to get more mobile organisms to move their genes over there somewhere) and with ones who produce seeded fruits and berries which will pass through an animal’s digestive tract relatively unscathed and wind up in a nutrient rich environment far from itself. There’s also wind-based pollination and different lifecycles and so on, but the point is that being eaten is the entire point of producing fruit - for the most part.
Anyway, that class of people are called “fructarians.” It’s not actually a super healthy diet for a human and I do not recommend it. They intentionally steer away from plants like carrots because you can’t eat a carrot without killing the carrot plant, while you can eat an apple without killing an apple tree, if that makes sense.
In any case, while I respect the motivation, I think it’s going over the top. While I’ll always try to support people’s choices in things like diets and morality, it really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny after a point. I’ve read about religions that encourage people to sweep the road ahead of them as they walk so as to not step on an insect, and who strain their water so as not to accidentally consume what they consider to be a tiny animal. The truth is that you’re messing things up left and right while sweeping in front of you, and anything that does actually get caught in your filter is almost certainly going to die almost instantly.
There was an embarrassingly long time when we thought that animals (and even human children) could not feel pain. This was obviously wrong. At the same time, I don’t think we need to project an existential terror as being felt by a carrot.
Dont tell the vegetarians I guess
The extreme of ethical veganism would be fruitarianism, where you only eat (botanical) fruits, i.e. that which plants give freely in exchange for spreading and fertilizing their seed
Yeah, you are eating their children.
Ideally, you’re providing their children a nourishing, nitrogen-rich environment to begin their growth. Practically, they get flushed.
I’ll be damned, this could explain why the Pope shits in the woods.
“Or… do.” - the angry …what would the term be for some one who eats only artificial foods? The angry that-guy.
Plants release VOCs which is basically their way of screaming. Once I learned about that I immediately looked up how to do photosynthesis.
“Trees are assholes” - Randy Hickey
That moment when it sounds like somebody was watching too much Avatar while high on shrooms, but he’s actually referencing recent science.
Science needs descriptive language, repeatable experiments and people who enjoy putting them together.
The intersection between that and reality is actually quite miniscule.
I love your username, Dr_Satan
