The opinions in this post are those of the author (Pedro J. Aphalo).
The scientific discussion about “plant intelligence” was started by Anthony Trewavas nearly 20 years ago, culminating with the publication of his book Plant Behaviour and Intelligence. The use of the word “intelligence” for plants was then controversial and remains nowadays still controversial. On the other hand the phenomena described and the experiments used as support used by Trewavas are not specially controversial.
In recent times the use of the term “plant intelligence” has reached the daily press and science popularization books in addition to videos in the internet. Much of this recent material is not only controversial in the meaning given to the word “intelligence” but also in the quality or strength of the evidence presented. This has led, in my view, to confusion and misinterpretations of what has been actually demonstrated with experiments versus what remians as tentative hypotheses in need of (further) testing. Continue reading “What is plant intelligence? and what it is not?”