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...