Common Scents: Plants Constantly Catch a Whiff of Their Neighbors' Perfume

By Daniel Chamovitz
Botanists are getting a whiff of the ways that plants smell one another. Some plants recognize injured neighbors by scent; others sniff out a meal
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
My Comments:

Re: "other flora throughout our natural world respond to pheromones, just as we do. Plants detect a volatile chemical in the air, and they convert this signal (albeit nerve-free) into a physiological response. Surely this could be considered olfaction."

The concept of human pheromones has been challenged -- even by olfactory researchers like Richard L. Doty in his book "The Great Pheromone Myth." Cearly, however, the concept is one of olfactory/pheromonal communication that must occur for any species of plant or animal to survive. Nutrient chemicals, for example, calibrate individual survival via their epigenetic effects on intracellular signaling. The nutrients metabolize to pheromones that standardize and control reproduction.

The common molecular mechanisms place the human pheromone-deniers in a category that could only be reserved for those who think that plant odors (as in food odors) do not have the same epigenetic effects on intracellular signaling as pheromones do in species from microbes to man. How (e.g.,on earth) could humans not produce and respond to pheromones. Are we evolutionarily adapted outliers due to random mutations, or is our behavior consistent with the epigenetic effects of nutrient chemicals and pheromones on pre-existing genetic variability across all species?

Fascinating!!