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Jun. 29th, 2023 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primePlanta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence, by Paco Calvo, with Natalie Lawrence. I'm afraid this book was a bit frustrating - it wasn't up to the standard that Ed Yong set in his book on animal senses, even though this one is written by someone who actually does research on plants' awareness and behavior. Calvo is the director of the Minimal Intelligence Lab in Spain.
For someone who is making a case that's counter-intuitive for most people, he's surprisingly sloppy. Maybe it's his co-author's fault? I assume that his English isn't quite fluent enough to write a book for general audiences, although he's done graduate work in Scotland. By sloppy, I mean that in some places he explains why it's not out of the question for plants to have awareness of their surroundings, which is fine, but elsewhere he describes them as "keenly aware." In one place he says that plants have the same neurotransmitters as humans do, but elsewhere it turns out that instead of dopamine, seratonin, etc., they have auxin, which is similar. Maybe it is! But he should have mentioned it the first time.
Almost everything he says about plants' learning, planning, etc. is just mentioned in passing; one would have to look at the papers he cites to get the details. And unfortunately, much of what he talks about hasn't actually been tested yet, they just have plans to do so.
He does make some good points. Plants stop doing things for a while if you administer a human anaesthetic - mimosa plants stop closing up, Venus flytraps stop snapping shut, seeds stop germinating. He makes the case that since we'd consider the single-celled organisms that plants and animals both evolved from to have some awareness of its surroundings, then it hardly makes sense to think that plants would have lost that while growing increasingly sophisticated. He notes that if a vine's growth is time-lapse filmed, the replay is enough like an animal that if it were an animal we'd credit it with seeking out a good direction in which to move. He notes that we're zoocentrically biased in favor of movement, and that plants sort of move too, or rather, they change their shape to accommodate their surroundings. And although he didn't mention it, I could see that the fact that humans don't grow intentionally could make it hard to conceive of plants doing so. He also has interesting discussions about the ethics of treating plants better.
However, although I'd agree with him that plants don't make their decisions through simple reflexes - they take a lot of factors into account - I'd say he hasn't yet shown that these things aren't happening through complex reflexes, like an automated decision-tree that's part of a plant's genetic makeup. Also, given how much plants get munched on by creatures of all sizes, there could definitely be a survival value for plants to not feel pain, and as I learned from the Yong book, organisms can respond to harm (as plants often do, releasing chemicals) without experiencing pain. Pain is possible too, of course, but Calvo didn't make the distinction. He's a philosopher rather than a plant scientist, and I don't even know about the co-author's background; she's just someone his agent connected him with.
Anyway... it will be interesting to hear what they learn over the next 10-15 years.
For someone who is making a case that's counter-intuitive for most people, he's surprisingly sloppy. Maybe it's his co-author's fault? I assume that his English isn't quite fluent enough to write a book for general audiences, although he's done graduate work in Scotland. By sloppy, I mean that in some places he explains why it's not out of the question for plants to have awareness of their surroundings, which is fine, but elsewhere he describes them as "keenly aware." In one place he says that plants have the same neurotransmitters as humans do, but elsewhere it turns out that instead of dopamine, seratonin, etc., they have auxin, which is similar. Maybe it is! But he should have mentioned it the first time.
Almost everything he says about plants' learning, planning, etc. is just mentioned in passing; one would have to look at the papers he cites to get the details. And unfortunately, much of what he talks about hasn't actually been tested yet, they just have plans to do so.
He does make some good points. Plants stop doing things for a while if you administer a human anaesthetic - mimosa plants stop closing up, Venus flytraps stop snapping shut, seeds stop germinating. He makes the case that since we'd consider the single-celled organisms that plants and animals both evolved from to have some awareness of its surroundings, then it hardly makes sense to think that plants would have lost that while growing increasingly sophisticated. He notes that if a vine's growth is time-lapse filmed, the replay is enough like an animal that if it were an animal we'd credit it with seeking out a good direction in which to move. He notes that we're zoocentrically biased in favor of movement, and that plants sort of move too, or rather, they change their shape to accommodate their surroundings. And although he didn't mention it, I could see that the fact that humans don't grow intentionally could make it hard to conceive of plants doing so. He also has interesting discussions about the ethics of treating plants better.
However, although I'd agree with him that plants don't make their decisions through simple reflexes - they take a lot of factors into account - I'd say he hasn't yet shown that these things aren't happening through complex reflexes, like an automated decision-tree that's part of a plant's genetic makeup. Also, given how much plants get munched on by creatures of all sizes, there could definitely be a survival value for plants to not feel pain, and as I learned from the Yong book, organisms can respond to harm (as plants often do, releasing chemicals) without experiencing pain. Pain is possible too, of course, but Calvo didn't make the distinction. He's a philosopher rather than a plant scientist, and I don't even know about the co-author's background; she's just someone his agent connected him with.
Anyway... it will be interesting to hear what they learn over the next 10-15 years.
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