Great post! .. early on "brain-like" .. "true nervous systems" .. while all the time we are learning so much more about them .. Mancuso in Vancouver .. lol .. i like the guy .. excerpt, just over about half-way down in yours ..
Early in our conversation, I asked Mancuso for his definition of “intelligence.” Spending so much time with the plant neurobiologists, I could feel my grasp on the word getting less sure. It turns out that I am not alone: philosophers and psychologists have been arguing over the definition of intelligence for at least a century, and whatever consensus there may once have been has been rapidly slipping away. Most definitions of intelligence fall into one of two categories. The first is worded so that intelligence requires a brain; the definition refers to intrinsic mental qualities such as reason, judgment, and abstract thought. The second category, less brain-bound and metaphysical, stresses behavior, defining intelligence as the ability to respond in optimal ways to the challenges presented by one’s environment and circumstances. Not surprisingly, the plant neurobiologists jump into this second camp.
“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.
“Neurons perhaps are overrated,” Mancuso said. “They’re really just excitable cells.” Plants have their own excitable cells, many of them in a region just behind the root tip. Here Mancuso and his frequent collaborator, František Baluška, have detected unusually high levels of electrical activity and oxygen consumption. They’ve hypothesized in a series of papers that this so-called “transition zone” may be the locus of the “root brain” first proposed by Darwin. The idea remains unproved and controversial. “What’s going on there is not well understood,” Lincoln Taiz told me, “but there is no evidence it is a command center.”
How plants do what they do without a brain—what Anthony Trewavas has called their “mindless mastery”—raises questions about how our brains do what they do. When I asked Mancuso about the function and location of memory in plants, he speculated about the possible role of calcium channels and other mechanisms, but then he reminded me that mystery still surrounds where and how our memories are stored: “It could be the same kind of machinery, and figuring it out in plants may help us figure it out in humans.”
.. the bit i bolded brought back Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind .. on the one read Mancuso makes at least some case for plants having some sense of one of Gardner's multiple intelligences ..
even if the mechanisms are not exactly the same .. so much comes down to 'definition' and even then fuzziness is sometimes the name of the game .. loved the post, and the bottom link list is a good one to the GMO debate ..
Q. My orchid quit blooming while I cared for a friend’s profusely blooming plant for a year. When the visiting orchid was gone, my plant started sending out shoots again. Is there any evidence that plants are competitive?
A. There is scientific evidence that plants can communicate chemically and that they do compete, said Marc Hachadourian, manager of the Nolen Greenhouses at the New York Botanical Garden [ http://www.nybg.org/ ]. But he added that one orchid could not prevent another orchid from flowering.
“It’s not uncommon for a plant to take a year off,” said Mr. Hachadourian, who supervises the garden’s orchid collection, “so without knowing the exact circumstances of these two plants, such as whether the visiting plant completely shaded the resident plant, it’s probably purely coincidental that the resident orchid didn’t flower that year.”
In the case of the black walnut tree, Juglans nigra, the effect [ http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/fletcher/staff/rbir/blackwalnutcompanions.html ] is particularly noticeable because the tree produces a considerable amount of a nontoxic chemical called hydrojuglone. This compound, found in leaves, stems, fruit hulls, inner bark and roots, oxidizes in the presence of air or soil into juglone, which is highly toxic to surrounding trees, making them wither and die. Juglone is one of many allelochemicals [ http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/allelochemical ] used by trees and plants.
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