From: "Martin Greenhut" <martyg@bcn.net>
To: <lightenlife@yahoogroups.com>; <globalpeacecampaign@yahoogroups.com>; <hd-g@slonet.org>
Subject: [lightenlife] [nhnenews] The Evolving Paradigm Of 'Plant Intelligence'
Date: Friday, March 04, 2005 9:39 AM



NHNE News List
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NEW RESEARCH OPENS A WINDOW ON THE MINDS OF PLANTS
By Patrik Jonsson
The Christian Science Monitor
March 3, 2005

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0303/p01s03-usgn.html

RALEIGH, N.C. - Hardly articulate, the tiny strangleweed, a pale parasitic
plant, can sense the presence of friends, foes, and food, and make adroit
decisions on how to approach them.

Mustard weed, a common plant with a six-week life cycle, can't find its way
in the world if its root-tip statolith - a starchy "brain" that communicates
with the rest of the plant - is cut off.

The ground-hugging mayapple plans its growth two years into the future,
based on computations of weather patterns. And many who visit the redwoods
of the Northwest come away awed by the trees' survival for millenniums - a
journey that, for some trees, precedes the Parthenon.

As trowel-wielding scientists dig up a trove of new findings, even those
skeptical of the evolving paradigm of "plant intelligence" acknowledge that,
down to the simplest magnolia or fern, flora have the smarts of the forest.
Some scientists say they carefully consider their environment, speculate on
the future, conquer territory and enemies, and are often capable of
forethought - revelations that could affect everyone from gardeners to
philosophers.

Indeed, extraordinary new findings on how plants investigate and respond to
their environments are part of a sprouting debate over the nature of
intelligence itself.

"The attitude of people is changing quite substantially," says Anthony
Trewavas, a plant

biochemist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a prominent
scholar of plant intelligence. "The idea of intelligence is going from the
very narrow view that it's just human to something that's much more
generally found in life."

To be sure, there are no signs of Socratic logic or Shakespearean thought,
and the subject of plant "brains" has sparked heated exchanges at botany
conferences. Plants, skeptics scoff, surely don't fall in love, bake
soufflés, or ponder poetry. And can a simple reaction to one's environment
truly qualify as active, intentional reasoning?

But the late Nobel Prize-winning plant geneticist Barbara McClintock called
plant cells "thoughtful." Darwin wrote about root-tip "brains." Not only can
plants communicate with each other and with insects by coded gas
exhalations, scientists say now, they can perform Euclidean geometry
calculations through cellular computations and, like a peeved boss, remember
the tiniest transgression for months.

To a growing number of biologists, the fact that plants are now known to
challenge and exert power over other species is proof of a basic intellect.

"If intelligence is the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, then,
absolutely, plants are intelligent," agrees Leslie Sieburth, a biologist at
the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

For philosophers, one of the key findings is that two cuttings, or clones,
taken from the same "mother plant" behave differently even when planted in
identical conditions.

"We now know there's an ability of self-recognition in plants, which is
highly unusual and quite extraordinary that it's actually there," says Dr.
Trewavas. "But why has no one come to grips with it? Because the prevailing
view of a plant, even among plant biologists, is that it's a simple organism
that grows reproducibly in a flower pot."

But here at the labs on the North Carolina State campus, where fluorescent
grow-rooms hold genetic secrets and laser microscopes parse the inner
workings of live plants, there is still skepticism about the ability of
ordinary houseplants to intellectualize their environment.

Most plant biologists are still looking at the mysteries of "signal
transduction," or how genetic, chemical, and hormonal orders are dispersed
for complex plant behavior. But skeptics say it's less a product of
intelligence than mechanical directives, more genetic than genius. Some see
the attribution of intelligence to plants as relative - an
oversimplification of a complex human trait.

And despite intensifying research, exactly how a plant's complex orders are
formulated and carried out remains draped in leafy mystery.

"There is still much that we do not know about how plants work, but a big
part of intelligence is self-consciousness, and plants do not have that,"
says Heike Winter Sederoff, a plant biologist at N.C. State.

Still, a new NASA grant awarded to the university to study gravitational
effects on crop plants came in part due to new findings that plants have
neurotransmitters very similar to humans' - capable, perhaps, of offering
clues on how gravity affects more sentient beings. The National Science
Foundation has awarded a $5 million research grant to pinpoint the molecular
clockwork by which plants know when to grow and when to flower.

The new field of plant neurobiology holds its first conference - The First
Symposium on Plant Neurobiology - in May in Florence, Italy.

The debate is rapidly moving past the theoretical. In space, "smart plants"
can provide not only food, oxygen, and clean air, but also valuable
companionship for lonely space travelers, say some - a boon for astronauts
if America is to go to Mars. Research on the workings of the mustard weed's
statolith, for example, may one day yield a corn crop with 1-3/8 the
gravitational force of Earth.

Some Earth-bound farmers, meanwhile, see the possibility of communicating
with plants to time waterings for ultimate growth. A new gene, Bypass-1,
found by University of Utah researchers, may make that possible.

Still, it can be hard for the common houseplant to command respect - even
among those who study it most closely.

"When I was a postdoc, I had a neighbor who watched me buy plants, forget to
water them, and throw them out, buy them and throw them out," says Dr.
Sieburth. "When she found out I had a PhD in botany, I thought she was going
to die."

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Published by David Sunfellow
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