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Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence

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Planta Sapiens presents 'fertile possibilities' to the public and in doing so it has put science on notice [...] We should be delighted with Professor Calvo's seeding of scientific curiosity for the hope that it offers" Provocative.... Science, at its best, progresses through a reciprocal interplay between speculation and experimentation. Calvo’s stimulating book draws us into that process. In Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 movie Arrival the US army asks an expert in linguistics to decipher the complex language of the seven-limbed aliens (“heptapods”) who have landed on Earth. It’s a memorable and indeed moving attempt to portray the immense challenges involved in bridging the gulf of mutual incomprehension between two completely different species.

Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence

The smell of freshly cut grass ‘comes from the chemicals released by the wounded plant to warn nearby grasses to mobilise their defences’. Photograph: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images Putting together an animal’s physical structure is complicated. The cells that make up the growing body are sensitive to nutrients, toxins, sights and sounds and a variety of early experiences. One of the most complicated processes in growing a human body is assembling a working brain from the growth of billions of individual neurons. No two brains are alike, because as neurons grow, they interact with the idiosyncrasies of the experiences of the organism that houses them. Their growth is determined by genes, but the genes produce a modifiable plan, and the elements that can modify it affect the selection of the genes that control the neuron’s growth, so that it looks as if it has a mind. A neuron doesn’t have a mind and is not, by itself conscious. It grows by following an algorithm that allows it to modify its growth pattern according to the circumstances of its owner’s experiences (Heisinger, 2021). Probably, roots follow similar genetically based algorithms and the tendrils of vines do also. Those algorithms were chosen because they produced a plant that was likely to survive in a certain environment. The plant itself doesn’t need to know what it’s doing to survive. Its components just need to follow a plan that was shaped by evolution.While plants may not have brains or move around as we do, cutting-edge science is revealing that they have astonishing inner worlds of an alternate kind to ours. They can plan ahead, learn, recognise their relatives, assess risks and make decisions. They can even be put to sleep. Innovative new tools might allow us to actually see them do these things – from electrophysiological recordings to MRI and PET scans. If you can look in the right way, a world full of drama unfurls.

Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence

While the author states that plants have a number of forms of intelligence, he is also careful to point out that most of the world still appears to be skeptical of this kind of thinking, and that there appear to be more critics than supporters of this theory, at this point in time. But merely posing the question makes this book part of a wider movement, beginning with Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and including Frans de Waal’s pioneering Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s masterly Other Minds (2016), which challenges anthropocentric ideas about intelligence, suggesting it’s not a uniquely human trait. The topic of plants connected the chapters together, but there were so many rumblings on different scientific projects that I found myself thinking quite a few times “what is the point of this part?”.

The title of Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper “What is it like to be a bat?” is often appropriated when a philosopher or scientist wants to muse about the possibility of some creature other than a human being conscious—and self-conscious. Nagel’s point was that consciousness is subjective and unable to be reduced to its physical components, be they a brain or a set of connections in an artificial neural network. Consciousness feels like something. You and I know what it’s like to be us. Probably your dog does too, and also your cat, your goldfish, your parakeet, a tiger stalking its prey in the jungle, a mouse hiding from a prowling cat. There are creatures, however, who are very different from us—bats, in fact, who use echo location rather than sight to navigate, or octopuses whose brains are distributed in their tentacles as well as their heads—and they complicate our usual attempt to understand a member of a species based on an assumption that they think more or less like we do. Even within the animal kingdom, the question arises as to how far down the phylogenetic scale we can go and still impute human-like motives and experiences to creatures such as flatworms, mosquitoes, polyps, bacteria, paramecia, amoeba. This was such an incredibly interesting book about the intelligence of plants. Not only does it talk about the science currently being employed to study plants and understand them better, but it discusses the implications of what it could mean for humanity and its future should we determine that in fact, plants are intelligent. What an intriguing book! I absolutely loved it. As a gardener, it’s always been obvious to me that plants have feelings. The way that hydrangeas perk up after being watered or the way zinnia leaves fold upward to shield their wound after being cut are obvious signs these species have feelings. The trunk of Darwin’s tree of life cleaved one and a half billion years ago, when the last common ancestor of all animals and plants heaved its last sigh. Calvo suggests that, to know ourselves, we should think on its rooted and stemmed descendants. “My image of myself changed as I took this journey,” he writes, and, imagining his own Kafkaesque metamorphosis, emerges plant-like. “My animal frame of muscles and skeleton, controlled by a cranium-bound brain, dissolved into a slow, flexible, elongated being with an entirely different kind of awareness of the world.” For Calvo is of the view, shared by a small but growing academic community, that plants are sapient and cognitive beings, each with its individual experience and awareness of the world. Simply by being part of this philosophical sea change, Planta Sapiens is an important book, if not especially compelling. It does contain some interesting vignettes. I had no idea, for instance, that the smell of freshly cut grass comes from the chemicals released by the wounded plant to warn nearby grasses to mobilise their defences. At least now I have an excuse for not mowing the lawn: I don’t want to hurt its feelings.

Book Review: ‘Planta Sapiens,’ by Paco Calvo - The New York Times

And this is the mindset I started reading this book with: I wanted to learn more about the plants around my apartment (because I live in the middle of the capital city with barely any plants outside my place). What I found instead was something different, and even after finishing the epilogue I still don’t know what to think of the ideas that were presented. Calvo’s thesis is primarily inductive, in that he examines plant movement in vines and root growth, tropisms, electrical conduction, and “defensive” actions such as the closing of leaves and tries to imagine the cognitive “machinery” required to carry out such “behaviors.” His evidence is impressive and sometimes startling. Plants are known to orient toward the sun (you can see this in your own garden), and some plants, such as sunflowers, will orient toward the sun and follow it as it moves across the sky. At night, they re-orient themselves to anticipate the next day’s rising sun. Dig them up and turn them 180 degrees, and within a few days, they will re-orient their movements to match the path of the sun. By doing so, they maximize both photosynthesis and the likelihood of visitation by pollinating insects. Plants will also alter their growth patterns, in terms of their roots and their stems, trunks or leaves, depending on the plants surrounding them, all to the end of maximizing access to resources such as sunlight and nutrients. They can even affect and be affected by the growing conditions of their neighbors, so that they adopt some of each other’s growing patterns. Their roots can alter their direction of growth by turning horizontal or even upward to avoid a barrier, or to seek moisture.Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. This book leaned much more towards philosophy than science. I typically welcome that; however, Calvo’s main goal to prove plants’ intelligence and sentience felt weak. Many of the given examples didn’t feel relevant to the overall topic (albeit interesting). Paco Calvo is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINTLab) in the University of Murcia, Spain, where his research is primarily in exploring and experimenting with the possibility of plant intelligence. In his research at?MINTLab, he studies the ecological basis of plant intelligence by conducting experimental studies at the intersection of plant neurobiology and ecological psychology. He has given many talks on the topic of plant intelligence to academic and non-academic audiences around the world during the last decade.

Planta Sapiens by Paco Calvo, Natalie Lawrence | Waterstones Planta Sapiens by Paco Calvo, Natalie Lawrence | Waterstones

Consider the movements of Mimosa plants, for example. A poke from a human finger usually causes the plants' leaves to shrink and fold against the stem. This response takes mere seconds—an excellent defense against herbivores. But after a few minutes in a bell jar suffused with anesthetic fumes, Mimosa becomes unresponsive. The same drugs quiet the gyrations of pea tendrils and the clenching of Venus flytraps. Plant blindness. That’s what scientists call the way we humans often fail to notice the staggering diversity and complexity of plant life around us. The philosopher Paco Calvo seems to be mercifully free from this affliction – he runs a laboratory in Spain studying plant behaviour, trying to figure out if that half-dead fern that you forgot to water on the windowsill ought to be classified as “intelligent”.Such astonishing findings have led the book's author, among others, to controversially refer to the study of these processes as “plant neurobiology.” Calvo goes even further, suggesting that plants are cognitive beings and may have “diffused consciousness.” When a vine sends out tendrils, it does so with intent, he writes, using light and chemicals to explore and then home in on a target. The author claims the plant is not “simply reacting,” but it is “making meaning” through inner awareness, perhaps similarly to an octopus whose consciousness seems spread among its arms. Although electrical and chemical signaling inside plants are well established, assertions about plant cognition and possible consciousness are highly contentious. A rebuttal by some animal and plant scientists of Calvo and his colleagues' earlier work states that not only are such ideas wrong, but they harm scientific progress by misleading students and redirecting funding. La discusión de la consciencia vegetal de Calvo también nos advierte contra la aplicación a las plantas de sesgos basados en los animales, debidos a nuestra incapacidad de apreciar cuán dinámicas son. Esta incapacidad se debe a que las plantas operan en una escala temporal diferente. Las plantas se mueven (principalmente creciendo en lugar de mediante la locomoción), pero lo hacen a una velocidad mucho más lenta que los animales. Esto hace que reconocer su conducta como conducta sea todo un desafío para nosotros, un sesgo que se ve un tanto atemperado por la fotografía a cámara lenta, como pueden confirmar los que hayan visto el reciente documental de la BBC “Green Planet”. “Planta Sapiens” nos fuerza, así, a considerar cómo las prioridades humanas podrían prejuzgar nuestra concepción de las plantas. This “Magic,” as Hodgson Burnett would put it, is something common to all living things. It is the very stuff that animates all life. Leaves, trees; flowers, birds; badgers and foxes and squirrels and people all exist along the same continuum, animated by the same essential things, expressed in the particular ways that their evolutionary journeys have elicited. They exist less on a hierarchical “tree” of life, more in an “adaptive landscape” in which each species is incrementally climbing its own evolutionary slope. In PLANTA SAPIENS, Professor Paco Calvo offers a bold new perspective on plant biology and cognitive science. Using the latest scientific findings, Calvo challenges us to make an imaginative leap into a world that is so close and yet so alien - one that will expand our understanding of our own minds.

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