Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence

Product Information

Are corals smart? Possibly smarter than you might expect for minute, static creatures. They can switch between their diets of sunlight and hunting for prey with tiny tentacles, and they go to war with one another over territory. But their swimming larval stage is their least self-possessed phase.18 In corals, then, motility does not seem to denote intelligence. It is when corals are sedentary that they engage in those activities, which would seem to contradrict Patricia Churchland’s argument that [i]f you root yourself in the ground, you can afford to be stupid. But if you move, you must have mechanisms for moving, and mechanisms to ensure that the movement is not utterly arbitrary and independent of what is going on outside. David George Haskell is a biologist and award-winning author. His most recent book is Sounds Wild and Broken (Viking, 2022). Nonfiction Big Bad Wolves

Planta Sapiens | Paco Calvo, Natalie Lawrence | W. W. Norton Planta Sapiens | Paco Calvo, Natalie Lawrence | W. W. Norton

In Planta Sapiens, Calvo tries to show us that our green friends do far more than just blindly react. He believes they “plan ahead to achieve goals” and “proactively engage with their surroundings”, as they grapple with gradual changes in the soil or the sudden appearance of a predator. Some plants seem to ‘remember’ previous droughts, conserving water more effectively than plants that have never encountered long dry spells Berry's path of inquiry is a deeply personal one. Struggling with anxiety, she tries to pinpoint its origins in her life and finds in the wolf a new way to explore her relationship with her own fears. Humans have long imbued wolves with coded meaning, and although the specifics of the archetype shift with culture and context, wolves function as “a pressure point in our psyches.” Berry explores this role through wide-ranging research, juxtaposing the “wolves” in her life—her fears around personal safety, solo travel and loss of family—with biological wolves and the cultural touchstones they represent.

Paco Calvo is a Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINTLab) at 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 : Unmasking Plant Intelligence - Google Books Planta Sapiens : Unmasking Plant Intelligence - Google Books

Calvo describes more sophisticated examples of plant behaviour; how some plants seem to “remember” previous droughts, for example, conserving water more effectively than plants that have never encountered long dry spells. Or how some behave differently when competing for resources against other species, rather than their own kind. I received an advanced copy of this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This book is scheduled to be published on March 14, 2023 in the US. ** Planta Sapiens è una folgorante esplorazione della vita vegetale e un invito a pensare al mondo naturale in modo nuovo e anticonformista. Stiamo smantellando le tradizionali gerarchie della natura, diventando sempre più consapevoli della vita interiore delle altre specie e di quante similitudini esistono tra noi e loro. Non possiamo più considerarci l’unica specie intelligente privilegiata sulla Terra. E se vogliamo salvare il bioma globale, non dobbiamo farlo. Se impariamo a osservare e studiare le piante in maniera diversa, rimarremo davvero stupiti da ciò che potremo scoprire. 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. 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”.Even if we take a very fundamental definition of consciousness – the presence of ‘feelings, subjective states, a primitive awareness of events, including awareness of internal states’, we cannot yet know if plants are conscious. But we also cannot assume that they are not." In 2030 biotech researcher Tereza embarks on an expedition across the Czech Republic and the authoritarian U.S. to recover the remains of her long-estranged mother, Adéla, after their reunion is cut short by Adéla's sudden death. Told from the mother's perspective from beyond the grave, the novel traces the way nativism spreads and how morally dubious technologies such as surveillance and immortality science thrive under a fascist, one-party-rule government. Author Jaroslav Kalfařturns an ambitious premise (a person whose body has expired but whose consciousness lives on) into a moving, frightening story about the strength of family bonds. — Michael Welch

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

There are many peaks, many ways of solving the same problem or being highly adapted to the environment. To take a classic example, eyes of different kinds have evolved over forty times. Each type of eye is a slightly different solution to the same problem: how to turn light into information about an organism’s surroundings. This metaphor might be more helpful than the image of a tree in helping us to overcome our perceptions of “higher” and “lower” forms of life. The tree depicts branching relationships over time, but it is misleading in combination with our inherent tendency to ascribe values to things. The idea of a mountainous landscape, paradoxically, creates a level playing field, each species faced with its own task, beginning from the same substrate and climbing busily away.

Big Bad Wolves

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. We are unimaginable without plants, yet surprisingly blind to their powers and behaviours. Planta Sapiens weaves science and history into an absorbing exploration of the many ways that plants rise to the challenge of living" Is the potted cactus on your windowsill a cognitive being? When the lettuce in your sandwich was cut from its roots, did it feel pain? Neuroscience reveals that we humans miss much of what unfolds about us, but we neither see nor observe the plant kingdom; we are blinded by our own animal senses. For a start, most of each plant is hidden underground. The “ wood wide web”, the magical subterranean symbiosis between trees and fungi, was a radical but only relatively recent discovery. Some scientists think (as Darwin once did) of a plant’s expansive root system as its head, meaning all we only ever see is its posterior. However, mostly what blinds us is our inability to apprehend the world on plant time; their pace of life redefines slow. Calvo has a wonderfully infectious enthusiasm for his subject that makes this book, for all its complex science, a joy to read. He challenges us to set aside our 'zoocentric' perspective and to change our view of plants radically: from mechanisms akin to robots to complex organisms with a range of behaviours, responding to and anticipating their environments. In doing so, he has written a genuinely mind-expanding book"

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

But as fascinating as these titbits are, you have to cut through reams of deadwood about the author’s career to reach them. It’s a shame. This subject deserves writing that fills the reader with a sense of wonder, encouraging us to think of ourselves as part of an intricate, intelligent biosphere that encompasses flora and fauna alike.In short, this was a letdown for me. I really did want to learn about complex plant behaviors and the idea of plant intelligence, but this book didn't work for me. In Planta Sapiens, Paco Calvo, a leading figure in the philosophy of plant signaling and behavior, offers an entirely new perspective on plants’ worlds, showing for the first time how we can use tools developed to study animal cognition in a quest to understand plant intelligence. Plants learn from experience: wild strawberries can be taught to link light intensity with nutrient levels in the soil, and flowers can time pollen production to pollinator visits. Plants have social intelligence, releasing chemicals from their roots and leaves to speak to and identify one another. They make decisions about where to invest their growth, judging risk based on the resources available. Their individual preferences vary, too—plants have personalities. All of which raises loud questions that Calvo and Lawrence see and echo but spend comparatively little time trying to answer. “We don’t seem quite ready to confront the welfare and rights of plants,” they write. “In fact, if we cared even a little for the unnecessary stress we inflict on plants, we would have set up ethical committees in research institutions by now, of the very same sort we customarily rely on for the purposes of animal experimentation.”