Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence

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And this is the mindset I started reading this book with: I wanted to learn more about the plants around my apartment (because I live in the middle of the capital city with barely any plants outside my place). What I found instead was something different, and even after finishing the epilogue I still don’t know what to think of the ideas that were presented. The trunk of Darwin’s tree of life cleaved one and a half billion years ago, when the last common ancestor of all animals and plants heaved its last sigh. Calvo suggests that, to know ourselves, we should think on its rooted and stemmed descendants. “My image of myself changed as I took this journey,” he writes, and, imagining his own Kafkaesque metamorphosis, emerges plant-like. “My animal frame of muscles and skeleton, controlled by a cranium-bound brain, dissolved into a slow, flexible, elongated being with an entirely different kind of awareness of the world.” For Calvo is of the view, shared by a small but growing academic community, that plants are sapient and cognitive beings, each with its individual experience and awareness of the world. Scientists have known for a long time that plants can communicate with one another using chemical compounds and it’s also been long understood that they use electrical signals (much like animals) to coordinate their internal response to the world around them. The ideas we will explore in Planta Sapiens are at odds with most people’s perceptions of plants. They might even make you a little uncomfortable, or force you to wonder what words like “behaving” or “awareness” can possibly mean for a plant, never mind “intelligence.” You are not unusual. It is entirely normal, as an animal, to have reservations about applying to rooted photosynthetic organisms ideas that we normally apply only to mobile, animal-like creatures. Most people are probably more comfortable describing the behaviour of an amoeba than of a vine, or the awareness of a woodlouse than a sunflower. You would probably be perfectly happy thinking about a jay burying acorns as “planning ahead,” while a plant “planning for the future” might make you feel a little uneasy. We will look at the many sources of your discomfort in the next chapter, exploring the numerous zoocentric traps that limit your perception and the long history of animal-focused indoctrination that has shaped your ideas.” The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our

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Planta sapiens ofrece una perspectiva creativa y audaz sobre la biología vegetal y la ciencia cognitiva. Partiendo de experimentos realizados con las tecnologías más avanzadas, este ensayo apasionante nos invita a pensar el mundo natural de una manera radicalmente distinta. The topic of plants connected the chapters together, but there were so many rumblings on different scientific projects that I found myself thinking quite a few times “what is the point of this part?”. It’s difficult to imagine a world in which plants are considered with anything like the empathy this book suggests they deserve, and not only because this would mean confronting a truly alien system of perceiving the world; it would also raise the question of what even painstakingly ethical vegans are supposed to eat all day long – after all, man cannot live on jelly beans alone.

Smart Plants

An astonishing window into the inner world of plants, and the cutting-edge science in plant intelligence. In Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 movie Arrival the US army asks an expert in linguistics to decipher the complex language of the seven-limbed aliens (“heptapods”) who have landed on Earth. It’s a memorable and indeed moving attempt to portray the immense challenges involved in bridging the gulf of mutual incomprehension between two completely different species. Scientist or not, I think it’s important for everyone to consider all possibilities, and this book is an excellent place to start if you want to challenge your own long-held beliefs. Looking deeply into possibilities of entering Jain-hood faiths as well as being a water-arian and/or Breatharian? How easy/difficult can lifestyle be? Realistic? Don’t know, really?)

Scientific American What Is It Like to Be a Plant? - Scientific American

El libro tiene una gran amplitud, dada su relativa brevedad. Más allá de la ciencia de la inteligencia y la conducta de las plantas, Calvo traza las implicaciones para el modo en que vemos a las plantas y su lugar en la naturaleza. El argumento central es que deberíamos tomar seriamente la posibilidad de que las plantas tengan sensibilidad (dicho en plata, consciencia) y, a través de investigación científica emergente y cuidado filosófico, podríamos empezar a imaginar “cómo se siente” ser una planta. También discute las ramificaciones éticas de la sensibilidad de las plantas (un tema olvidado, pero ya debatido por filósofos de la antigüedad como Teofrasto). Y también la infuencia de la conducta vegetal en una nueva era de la robótica, en la guisa de “crecebots”, que reemplazan los caparazones de metal y las articulaciones hidráulicas de los robots inspirados en los animales con cuerpos modulares “blandos” que crecen a través del espacio. This was such an incredibly interesting book about the intelligence of plants. Not only does it talk about the science currently being employed to study plants and understand them better, but it discusses the implications of what it could mean for humanity and its future should we determine that in fact, plants are intelligent. This unorthodox approach allows for the complexity of both Berry's personal journey and the wolf's status as a rich cultural avatar. In the chapter “Girl v. Wolf,” Berry unspools the parallels between her experience attending a college far away from her family and the wolf's quintessential role as a lurking threat to girls who leave home. She describes encounters with Big Bad Wolves that made her feel frightened and uncomfortable, but she also explodes the simplistic lessons of the fairy tale by examining how the story's evolution has distorted its original emphasis on survival rather than victimhood. She reflects poignantly on her connections with other female victims of violence whose fates, like Little Red's, were co-opted to serve others' agendas and to assuage—or exacerbate—their fears.

Plant life is, above all, decentralized and engaged in reciprocal relationships with other species. And our species has homogenized and destroyed many of these formerly effervescent plant communities, throwing them into crisis. With this erasure, we lose the intelligence—however we choose to speak of it—brought to us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Calvo is a professor of the philosophy of science in the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Murcia, Spain. Although he presents detailed scientific evidence to support his case, he also draws on philosophical arguments about the nature of consciousness. We humans have a tendency to believe that the world revolves around us, but Calvo writes that intelligence is “not quite as special as we like to think”. He argues that it’s time to accept that other organisms, even drastically different ones, may be capable of it.