A light and quick read that has generated, perhaps not unsurprising, a certain amount of pushback: Plants as intelligent beings. I know everyone is tired of voting and of polls but goodreads gives it a rating of 3.83 of 5 with 176 reviews. I didn’t read them all but I was struck by the number of reviewers (on the first page) who felt that the book lacked scientific credibilty. True, I would agree that the text is directed to a lay audience but then again Mancuso has quite a large number of scientific publications. In google scholar alone, I saw 100 with the tempting link to click for more. So, those interested in a more scientific presentation of the information should have access to ample resources.

But the heart of the criticism, in my opinion, was resistence to the idea that plants are intelligent. Even though I do believe Mancuso, I found as I read the book that I was thinking, “yes, but…”

I’m shamelessly copying something that reviewer Annie (goodreads, review dated Mar 15, 2016) wrote:
“This is not as kooky a book as it appears. 
 I really like one of the fundamental ways this is argued: we are intensely anthropocentric, and so we really define “intelligence” as “most like humans.” We might not say it in so many words, but that’s really the beans of it. That’s a pretty circular definition when applied to ourselves, isn’t it? 
 … Plants are not intelligent like us. No one is intelligent like us, because we made up the word intelligent and it only fairly applies to us, since we define it by ourselves. But every species, if they had words, would define intelligence as most like themselves. So judging any other species by ours is clumsy, egotistic, and pointless. “

One of our participants suggested that if one removes the contentious term “intelligence” and just compares the skills developed by sessile and mobile creatures, that the similarities are striking.

Mancuso is a regular speaker in addition to being a prolific writer. We watched a 13 minute TED talk from 2010. Mancuso’s English can be a bit difficult to follow but the talk includes a transcript although the transcript also can seem a bit odd!

In a more recent video, he starts by speaking about plant blindness before discussing many of the topics also covered in the book and making a case for plant consciousness. We only watched the first three minutes or so but there are some beautiful time lapse imagery of plants and seeds – some are ones we saw in the first movie but some other ones as well.

Not surprisingly, watching these time-lapse images brought up discussion of other time-lapse photography. Marisa shared a link of her carrion plant flowering complete with flies coming to pollinate it.

And, an aside, the plant I was describing but couldn’t remember was the parasitic dodder, which is, I think, also shown in the second video clip of Mancuso speaking. We did watch a clip of this plant in September 2019, the link is here: Parasitic Dodder (2 minutes).

Our December virtual potluck and movie will be Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants. This will be the first Monday in December, which is 7 December. And this series is full of spectacular time-lapse imagery.

In September 2019 we read What a Plant Knows by David Chamovitz. This book also deals with the research on plant senses. You can take a class with him lecturing on the topic through the website coursera.org. At the website, you should create a free account. Once you have your free account, look for Understanding Plants – Part I: What a Plant Knows. There are 7 weeks worth of lectures. Each week is broken into about 5-10 minute intervals for a total of on the order of an hour’s worth of lecture. At the end of the lecture is a hard quiz. It really does test your knowledge but you can listen to the lectures without taking the quizzes. One of the benefits of taking the course is access to other resources – like Darwin’s book on plant movement. Actually, you can find a copy of this as a 645 page pdf online if you’re interested.

Another pretty cool website with “plants in motion” is the eponymous Plants in Motion from Indiana University. It also has links to all manner of movies/videos with botanical information.

Janet mentioned MovingArt (I think?) on netflix. The pollination video clip I was talking about seems to be part of MovingArt. The bit with the bats pollinating the saguaro is at about 2 minutes.

And THEN, if you want to watch flowers blooming and listen to ‘relaxing music’ I found these two cool links: Relaxing Ambient Music (3 hours) and another one, the link to which has since broken. BUT, you can easily find more such links in the side bar of the link that still works!