Michael Pollan's article "The Intelligent Plant" appeared in the final issue of
The New Yorker in 2013. The text highlights some of the recent findings about
plants' ability to respond to their environment in ways similar to animals with actual
nervous systems. Pollan conversed back and forth between plant biologists who refer
to this field of study as "plant neurobiology" and those who appear to despise the
term. As the article progresses, it becomes clear that the disputations between the
two parties are more about language than science. The debate is about whether or
not it is justified to associate terms like intelligence, consciousness, and learning
with plants. The article gave a substantial amount of data, including helpful findings
from laboratory research. However, it is obvious that it was written leaning on the
side in favor of plant neurobiology.
Plant behavior is indeed intriguing, and Pollan did an excellent job of
captivating his readers with sound arguments. Proponents of plant intelligence state
that:
The sophisticated behaviors observed in plants cannot at present be
completely explained by familiar genetic and biochemical mechanisms. Plants
are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables—
light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes,
herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—that there may exist some
brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coordinate
a plant’s behavioral response.
However, linking the word "intelligence" to plants is extremely opposed by
many scientists. Lincoln Taiz claimed that plant neurobiologists' writings are riddled
with "over-interpretation of facts, teleology, anthropomorphizing, philosophizing,
and wild hypotheses." Pollan argued that "the controversy is less about the
remarkable discoveries of recent plant science than about how to interpret and name
them: whether behaviors observed in plants which look very much like learning,
memory, decision-making, and intelligence deserve to be called by those terms or
whether those words should be reserved exclusively for creatures with brains."
In addition, he did the community of plant neurobiologists justice by
conveying their perspectives. In the article, Pollan said that:
The hypothesis that intelligent behavior in plants may be an emergent
property of cells exchanging signals in a network might sound far-fetched, yet
the way that intelligence emerges from a network of neurons may not be very
different. Most neuroscientists would agree that, while brains considered as
a whole function as centralized command centers for most animals, within the
brain there doesn’t appear to be any command post; rather, one finds a
leaderless network. That sense we get when we think about what might govern
a plant—that there is no there there, no wizard behind the curtain pulling the
levers—may apply equally well to our brains.
Despite the debate over what should be used to describe plants' behavior, and
how we define the word "intelligence", the article is rather interesting and
persuasive. Plant neurobiologists’ ideas about plant intelligence are cleverly
presented.
Even though the thoughts of plant biologists who are opposed to "plant
neurobiology" were also presented by Pollan, they only constituted a small part of
the essay. The article focused more on proving them wrong. The title itself clearly
tells us the author’s stand on the issue.
According to Mallat et al. (2020), "in plants, no evidence exists of reciprocal
(recurrent) electrical signaling for integrating information, which is a prerequisite
for consciousness." They also stated that "plant neurobiologists have become serial
speculationists and the ratio of speculation to data in their oeuvre is astronomically
high." Lincoln Taiz said that the motivation for plant neurobiologists stems from the
environmental crisis. He told The Guardian: "They want to raise people’s
consciousness about plants as living organisms and reach them on an emotional
level. I’m very sympathetic to the motivations, but it is clouding their objectivity."
Furthermore, an article from Live Science reported that "Other researchers who
recently investigated the neuroscience of consciousness — awareness of one's world
and a sense of self — found that in animals, only vertebrates, arthropods and
cephalopods had brains complex enough to enable them to be conscious."
Overall, I found the article interesting. It’ll convince readers to think from a
plant's perspective. Plants’ ways of doing things, as described in the essay, are surely
amazing and a food for thought. Nevertheless, it would have been better if the author
addressed the contrasting viewpoints of plant biologists over plant intelligence in a
balanced manner. Doing so would give a greater view of the recent advancements in
the study of botany.