A Project on “Intelligence in Nature”

Craig Holdrege

From In Context #50 (Fall, 2023)

In the past few decades, scientists have begun to research and publish studies on intelligence in nature in ways that would not have been thinkable for much of the 20th Century. Although scientists have long spoken of intelligence in animals, now this term is used to characterize the way plants, fungi, and microorganisms live their lives. The ideas of intelligence and consciousness in nature are “in the air” and have found their way into many popular books.

Such developments in mainstream science are often indicative of new kinds of interests and sensibilities. The use of the term “intelligence” implies that some form of agency or inwardness exists and is at work in living organisms. This notion certainly goes beyond the mechanistic paradigm that still dominates biological thinking. If you think that one material happening causes another material happening, and that the totality of these cause-effect relations make up organic life, then you have a mechanistic view of life. This approach leaves no room for agency or inwardness. So to bring forth the notion of intelligence in all forms of life presents a real challenge to the prevailing paradigm. And it is, as you can imagine, highly controversial within the community of academic biologists.

It has long been a practice at The Nature Institute to carefully consider such potential paradigm-expanding developments within mainstream science. Recently we embarked on a journey to explore contemporary research into “intelligence in nature.” One especially “hot” topic at the present is plant intelligence. We are focusing our efforts on this area in the coming year. Our work involves the careful study of the primary scientific articles that claim to demonstrate plant intelligence and articles that are critical of this view. We discuss such articles in our research meetings. We hope to come into conversation with researchers who promote the idea of plant intelligence.

While we are still at the beginning of this undertaking, an interesting and significant challenge has already become apparent. The philosophers and scientists who write about plant intelligence are often motivated by the desire to raise the status of plants within the consciousness of scientists and the public at large. They believe that for far too long plants have been considered passive creatures. Significant abilities of plants have been overlooked and neglected. One approach to raising their status is to describe their capacities as intelligent. This brings them closer to humans and animals. Here is a quote from a recent article by a group of scientists who research plant intelligence:

Plants have developed complex molecular networks that allow them to remember, choose, and make decisions depending on the stress stimulus, although they lack a nervous system. Being sessile, plants can exploit these networks to optimize their resources cost-effectively and maximize their fitness in response to multiple environmental stresses…. We present concepts and perspectives regarding the capabilities of plants to sense, perceive, remember, re-elaborate, respond, and to some extent transmit to their progeny information to adapt more efficiently to climate change. (Gallusci et al. 2023 Trends in Plant Science)

This excerpt gives you a sense of how plant intelligence is now being characterized. Plants are spoken about in terms we use to describe human capacities and agency. This is interesting. We know very well from our own experience what it is to remember, choose, make decisions, re-elaborate, or respond. Evidently, the scientists believe there are phenomena within plants that justify such expressions. Since I have studied plants for many years, questions immediately arise: What are, precisely, the phenomena that the researchers refer to when they say plants are making decisions, remembering, and so on. Are such expressions appropriate to plants? When scientists use human-centered concepts to describe the capacities of plants, are they projecting human qualities into plants and thereby perhaps glossing over plant-specific forms of intelligence? At a fundamental level: How can we as researchers find ways to express the capacities of different kinds of beings that correspond to their nature? Might the idea of “intelligence in nature” need to transform and take on new features each time one considers a different kind of being? These are the kinds of questions that inform our inquiry. You can expect to find relevant articles in future issues of In Context.