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Vegetation and Intelligence

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A recent issue of The New Yorker contains an article by Michael Pollan on the intelligence of plants.


I've learnt as a consequence that between 2005 and 2009 there existed a professional entity known as the Society for Plant Neurobiology. The title is intriguing. Plants don't have nervous systems, so in a literal sense there can't be a plant "neurobiology." But the society was created n 2005 by botanists who believe, in Pollan's paraphrase, that the "electrical and chemical signaling systems [that] have been identified in plants ... are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals."


The scientists within this Society are wary of association with the 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants and the hucksterism they believe it represents.
The SPN changed its name to something less intriguing in 2009, possibly (Pollan's article suggests) as a result of government pressure. The federal subsidizers of promising scientific research didn't cotton to the notion of using the word "neurobiology" in so broad a way.
I used "cotton" as a verb in the above sentence with punster intentions. But now I don't think it comes off. Ah well.


Many of the colleagues of the SPN group and its more innocuously named successor disagreed and still disagree quite sharply over various formulations of their key ideas. But Pollan stresses that the difference is about the interpretation of facts rather than the underlying facts. In his words again, the issue is whether "behaviors observed in plants which look very much like learning, memory, decision-making, and intelligence deserve to be called by those terms," not over what behaviors exist.


Fascinating stuff, and heartening for a Jamesian.
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  1. HenryJanuary 5, 2014 at 1:08 PM

    You made me curious what SPN had changed its name to, so I went to the New Yorker article and found that it is the Society for Plant Signaling and Behavior. If plants engage in behavior, then I assume they might also misbehave. If so, how should we deal with it? Certainly by use of the carrot and not the stick.

    Does that come off better than "cotton"?

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