Planta Sapiens: The New Science Of Plant Intelligence, by Paco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence

How are we to deal with the idea–much less the evidence–that plants exhibit a sort of intelligence that, though highly different than our own, is in many ways analogous to our own with its own operation. The knowledge that plants (and fungi, and even unicellular life) has some degree of intelligence and pursues active plans and responds thoughtfully to its environment is something which many people likely cannot handle and do not want to think about. While I think the idea of plants being sapiens in the same sense that mankind is would be a considerable stretch, I do agree with the authors of this book that plants do exhibit some degree of intelligence, even if it appears very different from our own. Yet this agreement does not mean that I find the author’s writing to be all that convincing on certain levels, not least because this book exhibits some rather irritating flaws that limit its usefulness as a work, and certainly limit its appeal to me personally.

Many of the flaws of this book spring from the author’s commitment to defending a particular study of plants as if they had brains in the sense that animals clearly do. While it is becoming increasingly clear that plants can communicate and do appear to respond to the conditions around them and even possess discrimination in how they respond to different stimuli, as well as possess a high degree of cooperation with other forms of life, this book is moored in a Darwinist paradigm that cannot help but limit its insight and appeal. The author’s nearly continual slavish devotion to Darwin, particularly during the period of a one-off book where he wrote about his speculations on plant evolution and then more or less tossed them aside, forms the basis of this book and is repeated as nauseum throughout the text. Not only is the author’s view of Darwin highly nauseating on its own, it happens to limit the author and straitjacket his thinking into viewing plants as being engaged in pure competition against others, rather than involved in what is a highly complex cooperation with a variety of other beings, ranging from the bacteria that allow them to engage in photosynthesis, to the animals which spread their seeds, to the fungi who help them form communication networks, and even the human beings who shape their world for good and for ill. Viewing the intelligence of life as being a sign of intelligence in the creation of life, which appears to be an obvious corollary of the increasing evidence for intelligence in life as a whole, is probably several bridges too far for the author given his defective evolutionary worldview.

In terms of this book’s contents, this work is a bit more than 200 pages of core material divided into three parts and nine chapters. The book begins with a preface as well as an introduction on how it is that sleeping gas also puts plants to sleep, which indicates that it is something that goes back a long time in terms of its effectiveness. The first part of the book examines the task of seeing plants anew, by discussing our plant blindness (1), the challenge of seeing life from a plant’s perspective (2), and recognizing intelligent plant behavior (3). After this the author examines the science of plant intelligence with chapters on phytonervous systems (4) that transmit information within plants, examining the question of whether plants think (5), and looking at ecological cognition (6). In the third part of the book the authors examine some implications of their thinking, including pondering what it is like to be a plant (7), opining on plant liberation (8) and the rights of plants, and using knowledge of plants to create green robots (9). The epoilogue of the book then looks at the hippocamus-fattening farm of modern existence before the book ends with acknowledgements, notes, picture credits, and an index.