Are plants intelligent, or is that just a metaphor?
A bean plant planted near a cane grows toward it, and a flytrap goes quiet under anaesthetic. Yet most plant scientists call the brain talk misleading.
▶ Start the storyPlant intelligence is a field of plant biology that aims to understand how plants process the information they get from their environment. It has been defined as any intentional and flexible behavior that is beneficial and enables the organism to achieve its goal. The big argument is whether that word fits plants at all.
The evidence for plant abilities is real. In 2020 researchers found that French bean plants planted 30 centimetres from a garden cane adjusted their growth so they could use the cane as a support in the future. In 2017, a number of plants exposed to anesthetics lost both their autonomous and touch-induced movements: Venus flytraps stopped generating electrical signals, and their traps stayed open when trigger hairs were touched. Plants also have a kind of memory: in Arabidopsis, a cold spell turns off a flowering inhibitor gene, and it stays off after temperatures rise again.
But most plant scientists reject the terminology. Plant neurobiology, the subfield claiming plants have anticipation, decision making, learning and memory, is rejected by the majority of plant scientists as misleading, since plants have no consciousness or neurons. Terms like plant neural networks are closer to metaphors, much as the word learning is in AI.
Plants are cognitive (minimally)
- Bean adjusts to a nearby cane
- Memory of cold through a gene switch
- Anesthetics stop flytrap signals
Plants are not intelligent
- No neurons, synapses or brains
- Majority of plant scientists reject the terms
- Neural network talk is metaphor
The argument is partly about words. One of the biggest debates is how intelligence is defined, because without agreement the word can mean different things. So much of the fight is less about what plants do, which experiments can test, than about which word to use for it.
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Recap
Plants do sense and respond in impressive ways; the disagreement is over whether 'intelligence' or 'consciousness' is the right label.
💡 A trick to remember it · Plants answer, but do they think? The behaviour is on the table; the vocabulary is the fight.
Surprising fact · A French bean planted near a cane adjusted its growth to be able to use it as a support later.
Connects to
- 🌶️ How do plants fight back when they are being eaten?
- 🍄 Do trees really talk to each other through fungi?
- Plant perception
- Consciousness
Sources (1)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (16 claims) cites at least one of these.