Plant Personhood and Complexity

2025-01-30 11:47 UTC gpt-4o Open in ChatGPT ↗

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“But science’s biggest flaw and biggest virtue is that it almost always mistakes agreement for truth.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 6 likes Like “But plant personhood itself is a concept as old as human culture. As we’ve already learned, Native philosophies from all corners of the globe often understand plants as relatives, or ancestors, or otherwise persons in their own right. It’s not that plants are human, but that humans are just one kind of person, as are animals. Personhood means one has agency and volition, and the right to exist for their own sake.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 3 likes Like “It’s not that plants are human but that humans are just one kind of person.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 3 likes Like “It’s that lack of faith in the public that always results in an erosion of the level of public discourse. A faithlessness in the public is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remove complexity, and the capacity for complexity degrades farther. I think people can be trusted to handle a complicated truth. Plants are not omnipotent, otherworldly creatures. They are also not just like us. But neither are they neither of these things. There are elements of reality in both images, and fallacy in both too. This is hard stuff: one needs to welcome ambiguity and delight in the lack of easy tropes. Complexity is the rule in nature, after all. Thinking through this requires occupying a mental space of in-betweenness rarely tolerated in our contemporary world concerned with linear narratives and known entities. Báyò Akómoláfé, a Yoruba poet and philosopher, wrote about this in-betweenness, contemplating the way all creatures are in fact composite organisms. The state of nature is one of interpenetration and mingling that defies easy categorization. It occupies a middle place, both in the material reality of the world and in our understanding of it. “The middle I speak of is not halfway between two poles; it is porousness that mocks the very idea of separation,” he writes. Akómoláfé outlines our collective biological reality as a state of “brilliant betweenness” that “defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line.” It reminds me of Trewavas, telling me in his living room outside Edinburgh that scientists don’t know enough about plants to say anything dogmatic about them.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 1 likes Like “What did it take for that tree to live through those years, make thousands of leaves each spring, store sugars through the winter, turn light and water into layers and layers of wood? It is hard to underestimate the drama of being a tree, or any plant. Every one is an unimaginable feat of luck and ingenuity. Once you know that, you can’t unknow it. A new moral pocket has opened in your mind.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 1 likes Like “But moral attention is not a finite resource.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 1 likes Like “A good idea has a habit of showing up again and again.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 1 likes Like “The baby plant root has forty-eight hours after it decides to emerge to locate water and nutrients, and then push out a leaf or two and begin photosynthesizing, before it runs out of resources and dies. The first green parts of any plant are folded preassembled and waiting inside the seed. This preassembled plantlet bears little resemblance to the plant itself; it consists of one or two cartoonish green lobes on a short green stem, the manifestation of the plant emoji, and it is entirely temporary.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth tags: plants1 likes Like “Everything, at every level of life from a microbe to a rain forest, then, is an ecosystem. We are more like a system than a single unit. All biology is ecology.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 1 likes Like “Actual fern sex turned out to be much weirder. First of all, they reproduce using spores, not seeds. But here’s the kicker: they have swimming sperm. Before they grow into the leafy fronds we all know, they have a completely separate life as a gametophyte fern, a tiny lobed plant just one cell thick—not remotely recognizable as the fern it will later become. You’d miss them on the forest floor. The male gametophyte fern releases sperm that swim in water collected on the ground after a rain, looking for female gametophyte fern eggs to fertilize. Fern sperm are shaped like tiny corkscrews and are endurance athletes—they can swim for up to sixty minutes.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “THEY SAY TRYING to understand any culture is like looking at an iceberg: there are vast depths you cannot see.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “I awoke in the mornings at dawn because I’d recently noticed that this was when the world was most alive. How had I ever not known? At dawn everything shimmered with activity. Full daytime was a dead period in comparison. The birds in the salt marsh below the house called wildly, like they were caffeinated. I was not, at least not yet, but I liked the bleary minutes before my mind turned to more human affairs.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “In fact it seems hardly a stretch to ask whether a plant is itself without fungi.

Some evidence suggests that plants-which initially came on to the evolutionary scene as amorphous greenish blobs of algae-developed their first leggy forms precisely to house beneficial fungi. “What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi,” Sheldrake argues. By the time the first plant roots appeared, the plants had already been associating with fungi for fifty million years. By some scholars’ accounts, roots are literally the product of fungal influence, made to stitch plants and fungi into relation.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “Gianoli’s own work had shown that when the host tree was totally devoid of leaves, the vine leaves adopted their own normal, oval-shaped leaf morphology; plus, the vine always mimicked the leaves closest to its own body, whether or not they were actually part of the climbed tree-in cases where an overhanging branch of another tree brought its leaves nearer to boquila, the vine imitated those instead. “Vision seems to us a more parsimonious explanation of this complex phenomenon,” Baluška and Mancuso wrote in the journal Cell Press.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “Knowing that cyanobacteria have the capacity to see opens the possibility that perhaps the plant kingdom, which evolved from cyanobacteria, never actually discarded it. In the world of light and shadow, where all potential friends and enemies use visual cues to hunt and feed and hide, there’s evolutionary reason to believe that once an organism has an eyespot, it would hang onto it. After all, human and all other modern eyes likely evolved from ancient eyespots much like the cyanobacteria’s.

Of course, evolution does not always tell such a linear story. Plenty of features across all kingdoms of life have emerged and been dropped over many millions of years, only to pop up again, evolving back into being. But although scientists have not yet located ocelli in plant leaves, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. As Baluška and Mancuso argue, no one has yet properly looked.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “Making the mental space to imagine truly different intelligences, without jumping to easy human conclusions, is a difficult task.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “In The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf’s biography of the famous nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, I learned he’d had it too. Von Humboldt wondered aloud why being in the outdoors evoked something existential and true. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul,” he wrote; “Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” and therefore nature “gives the impression of the whole.” Humboldt went on to introduce the European intellectual world to the concept of the planet as a living whole, with climatic systems and interlocking biological and geological patterns bound up as a “net-like, intricate fabric.” This was Western science’s earliest glimmer of ecological thinking, where the natural world became a series of biotic communities, each acting upon the others.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “researchers had found promising indicators of memory in plants. Others found that a wide variety of plants are able to distinguish themselves from others, and can tell whether or not those others are genetic kin. When such plants find themselves beside their siblings, they rearrange their leaves within two days to avoid shading them. Pea shoot roots appeared to be able to hear water flowing through sealed pipes and grow toward them, and several plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off. (Other plants—including a particular tomato—secrete a chemical that cause hungry caterpillars to turn away from devouring their leaves to eat each other instead.) Papers probing other remarkable behaviors were growing from a trickle to a fairly robust stream. It seemed like botany was on the verge of something new. I wanted to stick around and watch.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “Crop science is typically seen as the domestication of scrawny wild species to turn them into plump, useful food machines, a testament to human will and ingenuity. But Baluska objects to it being true “domestication” at all. “Domestication would be when one partner has more influence than the other one. But there is no evidence for this,” he says.

“A better word would be coevolution. We are changing them, but they are changing us.” Clearly plants are capable of complex manipulation. Baluska winkingly hints at the thousands of natural plant chemicals we unwittingly ingest every time we eat a fruit or vegetable. “We don’t know what they are doing with our brain,” he says. “We can never be sure, when we are eating something nice and tasty, that there is not something in this tomato or apple that makes us believe it is the best food.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “If the genetic properties of bacteria were applied to larger beings, Margulis wrote, we would live in a science-fiction world where people could grow wings by picking up genes from a bat, or a mushroom could turn green and begin to photosynthesize by picking up genes from a nearby plant. This gives me a clearer way to see how Gianoli’s theory could work: instead of imagining a foreign set of bacteria hijacking the boquila’s ingrained sense of personal shape, perhaps the bacteria that lives within boquila and determines its developmental expression could simply be picking up errant genetic cues from the bacteria doing the same thing inside other plants. “People and other eukaryotes are like solids frozen in a specific genetic mold,” Margulis and Sagan write, “whereas the mobile, interchanging suite of bacterial genes is akin to a liquid or gas.” One begins to see the world in bacterial terms-a microcosmic sea of shifting identity and form. Under the surface, our bacterial selves are morphing and changing. We are all in flux. Who is to say where any of us begin and end?” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “Just as plants communication can cross the species divide, so can ours. And we’re speaking to them in smog.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “As any plant grows, it builds its body to suit its environment, both in root and shoot. The shape that emerges is a direct response to the physical obstacles it encountered, the distribution of nutrients in the soil, and the direction of the light. In this way a plant’s entire body is a physical expression of the conditions, moment to moment, over the whole story of its life. The newest shoots and roots will account for changes; the oldest parts of the plant are a record of conditions that came before. In this way the plant is a map for which one hardly needs a key: the story of a plant’s life can be decoded on sight.

In our brains, a memory is a physical entity, a connection between neurons. In plants, memories may be physical pathways too; the root that threads through soil branches and turns, indicating where a patch of moisture once was. The lobe on a trunk where a branch once existed tells the story of sunlight since shaded out. The substrate of these memories is the soil and the atmosphere, rather than our brain matter.” ― Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “In Trewavas’s assessment, the brain is just one strategy for building intelligence and consciousness. Plants simply took a different evolutionary route, according to their needs: their attention and awareness is localized in each of their parts, but each of their parts communicates and strategizes across the whole, producing consciousness all the same. “The individual plant containing many millions of cells is a self-organizing, complex system with distributed control permitting local environmental exploitation but in the context of the whole plant system,” he writes. “Consciousness is thus not localized but is shared throughout the plant in contrast to the more centralized location in the animal brain.” ― Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “In a paper titled “Broadening the Definition of a Nervous System to Better Understand the Evolution of Plants and Animals,” Llinás and Sergio Miguel-Tomé, a colleague at the University of Salamanca, basically argue 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 in a different form. Defining it phylogenetically-meaning assigning it only to one portion of the tree of life-ignores the very real force of convergent evolution, where organisms separately evolved similar systems to deal with similar challenges. It happens all the time in evolution; a classic example is wings. Flight evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects, to very similar effect. Eyes are another example; the eye lens has evolved separately several times.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “General System Theory, a slim book by Ludwig von Bertalanffy” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “Plants remind us that we are contiguous with our environment, impacted by its every fluctuation, impacts that reverberate through our lineage. Our environment shapes our lives and the lives of our descendants. We inherit their environment in bodily form. One could say we inherit the earth.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “In the eastern Atlantic forest of Bahia, Brazil, on the sandy, mossy ground beside the off-grid house of a single amateur botanist, grows an inch-tall plant with reddish stems ending in tiny dart-shaped flowers. The flowers are white with bright pink tips, like a fountain pen dipped in ink. The whole plant emerges only during the rainy season, springing up within weeks of the persistent wetness that begins in March and dying back entirely by its end in November. Within a month the little dart-flowers open, get pollinated, and disappear, having done their part. Capsules of fruit appear in their place, holding the seeds of the next generation. The usual course of events. But then something unusual happens: the fruit-tipped stems begin to bend toward the earth, genuflecting, craning like slender necks bent in deference. The fruits and the earth connect. The stems keep bending. They push down until the capsule is buried in the soft moss. The plant, Spigelia genuflexa, has planted its own seeds.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “Crops are typically grown in cultivars, or variations on a single species, bred with some specific trait in mind. Within a single cultivar, the plants tend to be genetically similar, though not identical. But individual altruistic tendencies may be more clearly distinguishable among them. To develop cultivars in crop breeding, farmers select for the most “vigorous”-looking individual plants in a field. But these are actually the most competitive individuals. The plants with more altruistic tendencies will be more reserved, in that they will tend not to grow aggressively into their neighbor’s sun space. So it seems the history of crop breeding has actually helped to reduce altruism, to its own peril, writes Dudley. If a farmer were to instead select altruistic plants early in the breeding process, it could steer the crop toward allocating fewer resources into competing for space, therefore presumably putting more energy into reproduction—that is, the development of the fruit the crop is prized for. On the flip side, aggressive plants are useful when the aggression is directed to plants outside the cultivar—non-kin plants, including weeds. Choosing the plants adept at helping their neighbors but fighting off intruders might ultimately result in a highly resilient cultivar. In this way, paying attention to individual plants’ social traits—might we say personalities?—could have a real benefit to the way we grow food.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “Within a decade, evidence to support Dudley’s work began flowing in. In 2017 a researcher in Argentina found that sunflower farmers could get up to 47 percent more oil yield from their plants if they grew them in rows with kin closely packed next to one another. They grew the flowers at densities unheard of in sunflower farming, but instead of attacking each other underground, as closely grown sunflowers were assumed to always do, they did the opposite: aboveground, the sunflowers tilted their stalks at alternating angles to avoid shading their kin-neighbors. There was no sign that they were robbing each other of nutrients, either. If they were allowed to grow at odd angles, rather than be forced to stand straight up, each flower received more light, and oil production skyrocketed.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 0 likes Like “What plants illustrate best is that none of us can actually run from the impact of our environment, and the environment of our parents. It’s already inside us.” ― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

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“But science’s biggest flaw and biggest virtue is that it almost always mistakes agreement for truth.”

“But plant personhood itself is a concept as old as human culture. As we’ve already learned, Native philosophies from all corners of the globe often understand plants as relatives, or ancestors, or otherwise persons in their own right. It’s not that plants are human, but that humans are just one kind of person, as are animals. Personhood means one has agency and volition, and the right to exist for their own sake.”

“It’s not that plants are human but that humans are just one kind of person.”

“It’s that lack of faith in the public that always results in an erosion of the level of public discourse. A faithlessness in the public is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remove complexity, and the capacity for complexity degrades farther. I think people can be trusted to handle a complicated truth. Plants are not omnipotent, otherworldly creatures. They are also not just like us. But neither are they neither of these things. There are elements of reality in both images, and fallacy in both too. This is hard stuff: one needs to welcome ambiguity and delight in the lack of easy tropes. Complexity is the rule in nature, after all. Thinking through this requires occupying a mental space of in-betweenness rarely tolerated in our contemporary world concerned with linear narratives and known entities. Báyò Akómoláfé, a Yoruba poet and philosopher, wrote about this in-betweenness, contemplating the way all creatures are in fact composite organisms. The state of nature is one of interpenetration and mingling that defies easy categorization. It occupies a middle place, both in the material reality of the world and in our understanding of it. “The middle I speak of is not halfway between two poles; it is porousness that mocks the very idea of separation,” he writes. Akómoláfé outlines our collective biological reality as a state of “brilliant betweenness” that “defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line.” It reminds me of Trewavas, telling me in his living room outside Edinburgh that scientists don’t know enough about plants to say anything dogmatic about them.”

“What did it take for that tree to live through those years, make thousands of leaves each spring, store sugars through the winter, turn light and water into layers and layers of wood? It is hard to underestimate the drama of being a tree, or any plant. Every one is an unimaginable feat of luck and ingenuity. Once you know that, you can’t unknow it. A new moral pocket has opened in your mind.”

“But moral attention is not a finite resource.”

“A good idea has a habit of showing up again and again.”

“The baby plant root has forty-eight hours after it decides to emerge to locate water and nutrients, and then push out a leaf or two and begin photosynthesizing, before it runs out of resources and dies. The first green parts of any plant are folded preassembled and waiting inside the seed. This preassembled plantlet bears little resemblance to the plant itself; it consists of one or two cartoonish green lobes on a short green stem, the manifestation of the plant emoji, and it is entirely temporary.”

“Everything, at every level of life from a microbe to a rain forest, then, is an ecosystem. We are more like a system than a single unit. All biology is ecology.”

“Actual fern sex turned out to be much weirder. First of all, they reproduce using spores, not seeds. But here’s the kicker: they have swimming sperm. Before they grow into the leafy fronds we all know, they have a completely separate life as a gametophyte fern, a tiny lobed plant just one cell thick—not remotely recognizable as the fern it will later become. You’d miss them on the forest floor. The male gametophyte fern releases sperm that swim in water collected on the ground after a rain, looking for female gametophyte fern eggs to fertilize. Fern sperm are shaped like tiny corkscrews and are endurance athletes—they can swim for up to sixty minutes.”

“THEY SAY TRYING to understand any culture is like looking at an iceberg: there are vast depths you cannot see.”

“I awoke in the mornings at dawn because I’d recently noticed that this was when the world was most alive. How had I ever not known? At dawn everything shimmered with activity. Full daytime was a dead period in comparison. The birds in the salt marsh below the house called wildly, like they were caffeinated. I was not, at least not yet, but I liked the bleary minutes before my mind turned to more human affairs.”

“In fact it seems hardly a stretch to ask whether a plant is itself without fungi.

Some evidence suggests that plants—which initially came on to the evolutionary scene as amorphous greenish blobs of algae—developed their first leggy forms precisely to house beneficial fungi. “What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi,” Sheldrake argues. By the time the first plant roots appeared, the plants had already been associating with fungi for fifty million years. By some scholars’ accounts, roots are literally the product of fungal influence, made to stitch plants and fungi into relation.”

“Gianoli’s own work had shown that when the host tree was totally devoid of leaves, the vine leaves adopted their own normal, oval-shaped leaf morphology; plus, the vine always mimicked the leaves closest to its own body, whether or not they were actually part of the climbed tree—in cases where an overhanging branch of another tree brought its leaves nearer to boquila, the vine imitated those instead.”

“Knowing that cyanobacteria have the capacity to see opens the possibility that perhaps the plant kingdom, which evolved from cyanobacteria, never actually discarded it.”

“Making the mental space to imagine truly different intelligences, without jumping to easy human conclusions, is a difficult task.”

“Plants remind us that we are contiguous with our environment, impacted by its every fluctuation, impacts that reverberate through our lineage. Our environment shapes our lives and the lives of our descendants. We inherit their environment in bodily form. One could say we inherit the earth.”

“Just as plants’ communication can cross the species divide, so can ours. And we’re speaking to them in smog.”

“As any plant grows, it builds its body to suit its environment, both in root and shoot. The shape that emerges is a direct response to the physical obstacles it encountered, the distribution of nutrients in the soil, and the direction of the light. In this way a plant’s entire body is a physical expression of the conditions, moment to moment, over the whole story of its life.”

“In Trewavas’s assessment, the brain is just one strategy for building intelligence and consciousness. Plants simply took a different evolutionary route, according to their needs: their attention and awareness is localized in each of their parts, but each of their parts communicates and strategizes across the whole, producing consciousness all the same.”

“Crops are typically grown in cultivars, or variations on a single species, bred with some specific trait in mind. Within a single cultivar, the plants tend to be genetically similar, though not identical. But individual altruistic tendencies may be more clearly distinguishable among them.”

“What plants illustrate best is that none of us can actually run from the impact of our environment, and the environment of our parents. It’s already inside us.”