the nature of plants

Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates

“…Plant science could be regarded as a gatekeeping discipline -much like traditional animal science was before the advent of ethological methods in the 1940s and 50s -utilising biology to buttress the myth of human exceptionalism (cf. de Waal 2006;Marder 2013;Cahill, Ljubotina and Mahal 2019;Myers 2020).…”

“…However, the longstanding tensions between mechanistic and vitalistic metaphors to describe plant behaviour and communication (Ingensiep 2001) have reached a breaking point in the past couple of decades as plant science has matured. Perhaps ironically, the technoscientific apparatuses of plant biology have revealed uncanny (to many plant biologists) similarities between plants and animals along various dimensions (Cahill, Ljubotina and Mahal 2019). The most controversial of these similarities is the hypothesis that plant root systems function as a sort of 'brain', an idea that has launched a cottage industry in 'plant neurobiology' studies, noting that plants are replete with neurotransmitter analogues and hormones shared with humans (Brenner et al 2006;Stahlberg 2006;Baluška and Mancuso 2007;Baluška and Mancuso 2009;Trewavas 2014).…”