Mr.Samsa wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:And so my obvious follow up is 'do plants?' Or are they like the oil? Or are they on a gradient somewhere between?

There are difficulties in answering this, mostly the fact that plants move on a vastly different time scale compared to animals. But Trewavas makes arguments which suggest that plant behavior is more similar to animals than to oil.

I actually keep feeling drawn more to a linguistic explanation of the difficulty here. I recall a very old hypothesis by Sapir and Whorf that suggested people are restricted in the scope of their cognitive exploration of topics by the attributes of the language they use. While this has often been refuted over the years, there are good arguments supporting it, like the use of math as a more precise language for dealing with particular phenomena. In this case, I feel that we are stuck using words that are absolutes, and consequently can't quite find the gradient of nuance we need to explore this topic satisfactorily.

But I would certainly hope that, by any definition, plant behaviour would be deemed closer to animals than oil!

Mr.Samsa wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:As a corollary to your goosebumps and learning.... when an organism gets a virus, it builds up antibodies. Consequently is has 'learned' from its environment, and will be able to apply that learning in the future. However, would that be considered intelligent, or would it be like the former instance of goosebumps?

Has it "learned" from its environment? I don't think it's an example of 'adaptively variable behavior' (learning) because it's adaptive, but not variable. So it's the same sort of response as goosebumps in the wind (i.e. an "unconditional response"). Interestingly, our immune system can be conditioned, so by associating an increased or decreased immune response with something like the ringing of a bell, we can systematically increase or decrease the immune response by ringing a bell. This would be an example of learning, but it would be debatable whether it would be "intelligence". It's certainly a kind of intelligence, but it would probably be an example of "biological intelligence", rather than "behavioral intelligence". Intelligence, in this example, would be if an organism learnt to avoid a room with lots of bells in it, or it executed some escape response when presented with a bell.

I am not sure whether I agree about it not being variable. Perhaps I am misreading the extent of the definition here, but I would assume variable to mean that an attributes value may change. In that case, I presume that antibodies can form in a variety of chemically different ways, to counter a variety of different strains of a virus, and a variety of different viruses. The production of those antibodies can be variably successful in any given individual organism, and can also exhibit variety across a representative selection of that species.

If intelligence is defined to be 'Adaptively variable behaviour within the lifetime of the individual', I think I'd be hard pressed to exclude immune systems from matching the definition, but be similarly hard pressed to accept they exhibit intelligence.

Very thought-provoking though. I am going to sit down and watch The Private Life of Plants now and keep the question in my head throughout: 'does this equate to intelligence?'.

Peter Brown wrote:I watched some old research performed years ago on the BBC. Simple test really, they hooked some plants to some sensor and cut the lawn, when the lawnmower man entered the room the plants screamed.

That was utter bunk: "Backster phenomenon".

Here's a relevant phenomenon ... a plant that has evolved to produce leaves that act as sonar reflectors, which enable its pollinating bats to find it more easily. Basically, this would be a selectable trait. Some members of the population produce leaves that happen to produce increased sound reflections in the relevant frequency band than usual, and the pollinating bats learn that those sound reflections correspond to their nectar source, so they visit plants possessing those leaves more frequently, making those plants more reproductively successful, and the relevant genes facilitating the development of those reflective leaves spread through the population. Subsequent mutations increasing the efficiency thereof spread via the same process, because they make it easier for their pollinators to find them and pollinate them. The plant in question would not need to possess any capability to respond to sound, because the selection would be performed by another organism with that capability, and with an incentive to use that capability in this way because doing so increases the likelihood of getting an easy meal.

EDIT: the scientific paper is here for those with institutional access.

Bloody hell, what's next? Talking plants?!!

Mr.Samsa wrote:

ughaibu wrote:

Mr.Samsa wrote:. . . . the topic of plant intelligence is an interesting one. I recommend reading this paper: "Aspects of Plant Intelligence".

Here's another article that might be of interest: http://philosophy.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/root/ ... ninplants/

The authors have released another paper on this topic: "Plants: Adaptive Behavior, Root Brains and Minimal Cognition" (or the direct PDF download here).

Thanks, interesting article, one begins to wonder about mooting the free will of plants. I'm impressed that the idea of root brains was already being considered by Darwin.