Trees are NOT alive.

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John99 said:
Kenworth, if i take a glass of water and spill it onto a piece of metal and in turn we have samller water droplet then we also have reproduction. Like it or not those drops are a reproduction of the original fluid. The evaporate at different intervals, some are smaller and some are larger so we cannot say that they are identical.

IF the sun squeezed out a smaller reproduction would that make any real difference?
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that is not reproduction.
 
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Enmos said:
Ok, but you agree that life defined in the mainstream way is different from "dead" matter right ?
What is the difference in your view ?
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Simon Anders said:
Clams, trees, stones, rivers, lichen, sand grains.....
No.
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Enmos said:
What do you mean no ?
You do acknowledge that there is obvious structure and organization to living things that makes things like homeostasis, metabolism, growth, reproduction, response to stimuli etc possible ?
This structure and organization is absent in "dead" things such as boulders or a glass of water.
Don't you agree that life (define in the mainstream way) is different from "dead" matter in this respect ?
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Simon Anders said:
No.
You are keeping the time scale too short.
It seems clear that most people do not really think trees are alive by their treatment of them. Certainly not in the 'same way' they do animals or at least humans. They see the tree, unmoving, seemingly unthinking and it means very little to chop it down. They think life is just like them and compare.

Let's toss out an intermediate life form: a glacier.
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Enmos said:
How is frozen water alive ?
All life reliefs on structure and organization.
And I know trees are alive.. I hope you just meant that as an example.
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John99 said:
A tree is NOT alive.
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oh and kenwworth. The way that trees reproduce is nothing like human reproduction. For one thing humans need another human. Plants do not, it is the amalgamation of two beings that separates alive from not (truly) alive.
 
John99 said:
oh and kenwworth. The way that trees reproduce is nothing like human reproduction. For one thing humans need another human. Plants do not, it is the amalgamation of two beings that separates alive from not (truly) alive.
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you need to seperate trees and plants.and then subdivide into different species of tree or you are just wrong.
i do not agree with you that it is the amalgamation of two beings that defines something as alive.i consider bacteria very much alive.
 
Reproduction is the biological process by which new individual organisms are produced. Reproduction is a fundamental feature of all known life; each individual organism exists as the result of reproduction. The known methods of reproduction are broadly grouped into two main types: sexual and asexual. Human reproduction belongs to sexual reproduction.

In asexual reproduction, an individual can reproduce without involvement with another individual of that species. The division of a bacterial cell into two daughter cells is an example of asexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction is not, however, limited to single-celled organisms. Most plants have the ability to reproduce asexually.

Sexual reproduction requires the involvement of two individuals, typically one of each sex. Normal human reproduction is a common example of sexual reproduction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproduction
 
A number of invertebrates and some less advanced vertebrates are known to alternate between sexual and asexual reproduction, or be exclusively asexual. Alternation is observed in a few types of insects, such as aphids (which will, under favourable conditions, produce eggs that have not gone through meiosis, essentially cloning themselves) and the cape bee Apis mellifera capensis (which can reproduce asexually through a process called thelytoky). A few species of amphibians and reptiles have the same ability (see parthenogenesis for concrete examples). A very unusual case among more advanced vertebrates is the female turkey's ability to produce fertile eggs in the absence of a male.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexual_reproduction#Examples_in_animals

I guess John doesn't consider those animals alive either.
And by the way, trees also produce sexually.
 
Kenworth,

I consider bacteria to be alive too.

You brought up reproduction but i do know that some bacteria reproduce sexually with a male and a female. Either way bacteria are very, very much alive. Trees are organisms but not alive and they are closer to a rock than to an ant.
 
John99 said:
Kenworth,

I consider bacteria to be alive too.

You brought up reproduction but i do know that some bacteria reproduce sexually with a male and a female. Either way bacteria are very, very much alive. Trees are organisms but not alive and they are closer to a rock than to an ant.
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welllllll.....you used asexual reproduction as a basis for reasoning that trees arent alive but now you are saying that asexual reproduction is not a solid basis for assuming something is is not alive.

sooooooooooooooooooooo


?
 
John99 said:
oh and kenwworth. The way that trees reproduce is nothing like human reproduction. For one thing humans need another human. Plants do not, it is the amalgamation of two beings that separates alive from not (truly) alive.
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John99 said:
Kenworth,

I consider bacteria to be alive too.

You brought up reproduction but i do know that some bacteria reproduce sexually with a male and a female. Either way bacteria are very, very much alive. Trees are organisms but not alive and they are closer to a rock than to an ant.
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John99 said:
You brought up reproduction. I dont think i ever made any statement like that nor would I.
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look at the two parts in red
 
All animals and plants are classified as multicellular eukaryotes: their bodies are made up of large numbers of cells, and microscopic inspection of these cells reveals that they contain a nucleus and a number of other organelles. Compared to prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria, plants and animals have a relatively recent evolutionary origin. DNA evidence suggests that the first eukaryotes evolved from prokaryotes, between 2500 and 1000 million years ago. That is, eukaryotes as a taxon date from the Proterozoic Era, the final Era of the Precambrian. Fossils of both simple unicellular and more complex multicellular organisms are found in abundance in rocks from this period of time. In fact, the name "Proterozoic" means "early life".All animals and plants are classified as multicellular eukaryotes: their bodies are made up of large numbers of cells, and microscopic inspection of these cells reveals that they contain a nucleus and a number of other organelles. Compared to prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria, plants and animals have a relatively recent evolutionary origin. DNA evidence suggests that the first eukaryotes evolved from prokaryotes, between 2500 and 1000 million years ago. That is, eukaryotes as a taxon date from the Proterozoic Era, the final Era of the Precambrian. Fossils of both simple unicellular and more complex multicellular organisms are found in abundance in rocks from this period of time. In fact, the name "Proterozoic" means "early life".
http://sci.waikato.ac.nz/evolution/AnimalEvolution.shtml
 
Enmos said:
I don't think he's willing to learn though.. doesn't seem like it..
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You are not willing to learn.

Take a person in a coma. They are living BUT they are not alive. If the creature cannot move, cannot think, cannot make decisions THEN the creature is not alive.
 
This is a silly argument based on John99 using his own special definition of "alive" and refusing to note how he's defining, save that we know he's *not* amenable to definition 1 in virtually any printed definition of the word "alive."

He's taking a figurative meaning of "alive" that has developed from the primary meaning, applying it to trees and concluding that they do not meet that figurative definition. John99 might as well claim that the Sun is not "hot" because "hot" means either "arousing intense popular interest or excitement ('Comic book movies are hot properties right now.')" or "physically attractive ('She is so hot.')" He might as well go further and say that trees are not "life" because they have no jobs, hobbies or friends (and so can very easily be said to "have no life.")

At the end of the day his special semantics don't matter, and no one should be flustered by them. Trees are alive in the literal sense no matter what John99 says and there are some figurative senses of the word in which they are not "alive." The subjectivity of the latter is obvious, given that John99 refers to bacteria as alive, even though bacteria are more like rocks than trees are like rocks. About half of all bacteria are incapable of directed movement, a fact that seems to be key to why John99's has issues believing in living trees, based on a peculiar definition of 'living.'

His special definition doesn't really matter though. It's personal to him, and it will cause him greater hardship than it will ever cause any tree. Language is a means of communicating ideas, and as such it works because there is a general consensus about what words mean. Often enough two people will have a different understanding of the meaning of a given word. The only issue here, is that Joohn99, is that John99's is such an outlier that I doubt 1 person in a 1000 would refuse to concede that trees are alive in the most common sense of that word.

Sadly, though language is a means of communication, we are 5 pages into this thread and John99 has *still* not clearly communicated what his definition of 'alive' is. John99, if you must point to an online dictionary, please let us know which numbered definitions apply, as Merriam-Webster's definition #1 clearly includes trees and coma patients and unconscious mountain lions alike. :D
 
John99 said:
Take a person in a coma. They are living BUT they are not alive. If the creature cannot move, cannot think, cannot make decisions THEN the creature is not alive.
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I've not seen any definitions of "alive" that reference either motility or sentience. Are those the keys to your "special" definition of it?
 
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