Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Michael Pollan: How Smart Are Plants? : The New Yorker

… Michael Pollan: How Smart Are Plants? : The New Yorker.

“I define it very simply,” Mancuso said. “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.” In place of a brain, “what I am looking for is a distributed sort of intelligence, as we see in the swarming of birds.” In a flock, each bird has only to follow a few simple rules, such as maintaining a prescribed distance from its neighbor, yet the collective effect of a great many birds executing a simple algorithm is a complex and supremely well-coördinated behavior. Mancuso’s hypothesis is that something similar is at work in plants, with their thousands of root tips playing the role of the individual birds—gathering and assessing data from the environment and responding in local but coördinated ways that benefit the entire organism.
All this does suggest there may be something to the notion that intelligence in one or another way, shape, and form is a characteristic of life. Certainly, the scientists who are dismissive of Mancuso and others are doing seem more dogmatic than scientific.

See also:  The Intelligence of Plants.

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