Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, “just traces.”

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In one experiment designed to test plant memory, Backster found that a plant that had witnessed the murder (by stomping) of another plant could pick out the killer from a lineup of six suspects, registering a surge of electrical activity when the murderer was brought before it. Backster’s plants also displayed a strong aversion to interspecies violence. Some had a stressful response when an egg was cracked in their presence, or when live shrimp were dropped into boiling water, an experiment that Backster wrote up for the International Journal of Parapsychology, in 1968.

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In the ensuing years, several legitimate plant scientists tried to reproduce the “Backster effect” without success.

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Clifford Slayman, a professor of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale, who also signed the Alpi letter (and who helped discredit Tompkins and Bird), was even more blunt. “ ‘Plant intelligence’ is a foolish distraction, not a new paradigm,” he wrote in a recent e-mail. Slayman has referred to the Alpi letter as “the last serious confrontation between the scientific community and the nuthouse on these issues.”

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When the fernlike leaves of the mimosa are touched, they instantly fold up, presumably to frighten insects. The mimosa also collapses its leaves when the plant is dropped or jostled. Gagliano potted fifty-six mimosa plants and rigged a system to drop them from a height of fifteen centimetres every five seconds. Each “training session” involved sixty drops. She reported that some of the mimosas started to reopen their leaves after just four, five, or six drops, as if they had concluded that the stimulus could be safely ignored. “By the end, they were completely open,” Gagliano said to the audience. “They couldn’t care less anymore.”

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Was it just fatigue? Apparently not: when the plants were shaken, they again closed up. “ ‘Oh, this is something new,’ ” Gagliano said, imagining these events from the plants’ point of view. “You see, you want to be attuned to something new coming in. Then we went back to the drops, and they didn’t respond.”

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On my way out of the lecture hall, I bumped into Fred Sack, a prominent botanist at the University of British Columbia. I asked him what he thought of Gagliano’s presentation. “Bullshit,” he replied.

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At lunch, I sat with a Russian scientist, who was equally dismissive. “It’s not learning,” he said. “So there’s nothing to discuss.”

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Gagliano said that her mimosa paper had been rejected by ten journals: “None of the reviewers had problems with the data.” Instead, they balked at the language she used to describe the data. But she didn’t want to change it. “Unless we use the same language to describe the same behavior” — exhibited by plants and animals — “we can’t compare it,” she said.

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Fred Sack told me that he can abide the term “artificial intelligence,” because the intelligence in this case is modified by the word “artificial,” but not “plant intelligence.” He offered no argument, except to say, “I’m in the majority in saying it’s a little weird.”

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Mancuso thinks we’re willing to accept artificial intelligence because computers are our creations, and so reflect our own intelligence back at us. They are also our dependents, unlike plants: “If we were to vanish tomorrow, the plants would be fine, but if the plants vanished . . .” Our dependence on plants breeds a contempt for them, Mancuso believes. In his somewhat topsy-turvy view, plants “remind us of our weakness.”

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But Mancuso’s video seems to show that this bean plant “knows” exactly where the metal pole is long before it makes contact with it. Mancuso speculates that the plant could be employing a form of echolocation. There is some evidence that plants make low clicking sounds as their cells elongate; it’s possible that they can sense the reflection of those sound waves bouncing off the metal pole.

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Mancuso was about to begin a collaboration with a prominent computer scientist to design a plant-based computer, modelled on the distributed computing performed by thousands of roots processing a vast number of environmental variables.

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“Explore the soil!” With a grant from the European Union’s Future and Emerging Technologies program, their team is developing a “robotic root” that, using plastics that can elongate and then harden, will be able to slowly penetrate the soil, sense conditions, and alter its trajectory accordingly. “If you want to explore other planets, the best thing is to send plantoids.”

Pierre

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Pierre

Diffuse: Notable elements of the present past.