If a variety of nervous systems exist in nature, then what plants have is clearly one.
“Given what we know about the dynamics of sensing in creatures that have a brain, the lack of one should mean that any information generated from sensing ought to ripple meaninglessly through the plant body without producing more than a highly localize response. But it doesn’t. A tobacco plant touched in one place will experience that stimulus throughout its whole body.
The system overall works a bit like an animal nervous system, and might even employ similar molecular players. Gilroy, for his part, does not want to call it a nervous system, but others have written that he and Toyota have found “nervous system-like signaling” in plants. The issue has even leaked out of plant science: Researchers from other disciplines are weighing in. Rodolfo Llinás, a neuroscientist at NYU, and Sergio Miguel Tomé, a colleague at the University of Salamanca, in Spain, have argued that it makes no sense to define a nervous system as something only animals can have rather than defining it as a physiological system that could be present in other organisms, if in a different form.
Convergent evolution, they argue, wherein organism separately evolve similar systems to deal with similar challenges, happens all the time; a classic example is wings. Flight evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects, but to comparable effect. Eyes are another example; the eye lens has evolved separately several times.
The nervous system can reasonably be imagined as another case of convergent evolution, Llinás and Miguel Tomé say. If a variety of nervous systems exist in nature, then what plants have is clearly one. Why not call it a nervous system already?”
The excellent passage above comes from Zoë Schlanger’s article in the June 2024 edition of The Atlantic, titled The Mysteries of Plant ‘Intelligence.’ The article explores the latest arguments in science regarding whether or not concepts like memory, consciousness, and communication can be applied beyond the animal kingdom. And, just like the radical group of “plant neurobiologists,” made up of folks like Simon Gilroy and Anthony Trewavas that Shlanger details in the article, I’m in favor of plant intelligence and consciousness.
Additionally, I might mention that this article also helped me to remember that trees and plants have the ability to teach us about democracy, if we choose listen. Whitehead knew this too:
“[W]hen we survey the living world, animal and vegetable, there are bodies of all types. Each living body is a society, which is not personal. But most of the animals, including all the vertebrates, seem to have their social system dominated by a subordinate society which is ‘personal’… Thus in one sense a dog is a ‘person’, and in another sense he is a non-personal society. But the lower forms of animal life, and all vegetation, seem to lack the dominance of any included personal society. A tree is a democracy.” – Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
This article reinforces for me today what I have come to realize in the past: that there are other living organisms on Earth, besides humans, that talk to each other and we might be mistaken to assume that the intensity of experience open to humans is not also open to them.
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Illustration above by Will Drayson
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