Do plants feel pain (researched some stuff)?!

The main problems with this are the following words in your question:

articles
scientists
proven

Firstly, never believe anything you read anywhere ever. That is what they teach you when you receive an education in science. Because science isn't just some words on a page, it is a series of detailed instructions of what happened where and when so if you have the means you may repeat it yourself to see exactly what happens. Also science doesn't appear in articles. Articles are written by bloggers and journalists who may be discussing scientific findings, or their opinions on particular findings, or they may just be lying and saying something is science. Science is published in academic journals and the reports must be reviewed anonymously by other scientists in the same field before they are published. The results of the review must be referred to by the authors of the study before a journal will publish the study. And this process might repeat several times over many months before a report is actually published. Anything which has not gone through this process is not science.

Any article which doesn't say who the scientists were and where they have published their material is untrustworthy, because they do not want you to read the article to see if they really said what they are saying they said. Check this out for an example, it is from a blog post I wrote a year ago where a news article said stuff the scientific report did not: http://veghealthnews.blogspot.com/2010/0…

Finally the word proven is also something you do not see in science. Scientists do not tend to prove anything, rather we disprove things. That means there is always an element of doubt in our findings because you can only disprove what you are aware of. For animals to feel pain they must have a brain, a central nervous system, functioning nerve receptors and the capacity to respond to stimuli. If any of these elements are not intact, the animal may not feel pain.

For example a paraplegic has damaged part or all of the spinal cord in at least one place. This means that the nerves in their foot will still recieve incoming stimuli, they will respond with a nerve signal, but because that signal is unable to reach the brain they feel no pain and elicit no response. Because pain is experienced in the brain and that is all there is to it.

Plants have only the response to stimuli, they lack a brain, nervous system and nociceptors. Hence to prove that plants feel pain a scientist would have to disprove the current belief that all plants lack brains, CNS and receptors on the nerve endings.

So the articles you read were not scientific, they did not convey an accurate message of current scientific knowledge and it seems unless you seriously misinterpreted them they were misleading to say the least. I can tell you without hesitation that if scientists can show that plants feel pain it will be headline news around the world and the scientists will almost certainly win Nobel prizes. Most educated people will know their name, just as most know the names of Einstein, Hawking, Watson & Crick etc.

But don't take my word for it, look around and see if you can find a reference for where the science which shows plants feel pain has been published. Start with google scholar and see what you find. I could be wrong and it might exist, but I'm certain it does not.

vegan biologist

The problem is, semantically speaking, 'pain' is not an overly scientific word. It's sort of like the word 'planet,' up until recently; When they began to define it is roughly spherical and clearning it's path around the Sun. What is Pain? Is it quickly moving away from a damaging stimulus? Is it a dull ache from a high school sports injury suffered decades ago? Is it Emotional? Is it Mental? Is it Physiological?

Define Pain, get everyone to buy into a shared definition, then we can decide of plants feel it.

Plants don't have central nervous systems, so they can't feel what humans consider pain. However, they do react to some stimuli; some plants turn toward the sun. I strongly doubt plants suffer when harvested.

However, that said, if you're trying to use that to denigrate veg*ans, you should know a few things. First, other animals DO feel pain and suffer greatly in the animal foods industries. Second, those animals have to eat something, and that is...PLANTS. Third, it takes between five and fifteen pounds of plant foods, depending on the size of the animal, to produce a pound of flesh you folks call meat. So a carnist diet causes the "death" of far more plants than a vegan diet.

They don't have central nervous systems. And no matter how much people try to debate this, harvesting plants is still just not comparable to cutting an animal's throat, letting it bleed out, bashing its head in, scalding it alive, etc.

As they can't respond, I'm not sure if we'll ever know..