Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [37]
Drinking coffee together seemed to be a good time to get more personal. I decided to ask him whether his own behavior toward other species had changed in light of his scientific research. After all, his work showed that we have more in common with plants than most people suspect. He replied that his behavior had not changed much, as he had always respected other species, and had always enjoyed the company of plants and animals. This led him to discuss cruelty toward animals, a much-debated subject in Great Britain. Upon reflection, he realized that his behavior had changed on one count, namely that he had given up fishing. He had come to feel sympathy for the fish, because he could see that a fish on the line is frightened out of its life. Now he considers fishing to be relatively cruel. From his point of view, it is self-evident that animals feel pain. âYou throw a fish out of water, and itâs flapping around; well, the reason itâs flapping is because itâs trying to get air. And I suppose I can anthropomorphize that situation and see that I would be doing exactly the same damn thing if I was put into water, trying to get air in my lungs, not water. But I like eating fish. I just prefer someone else to catch it. We have to respect the system in which we live, because it will not survive if we donât respect it. And thatâs all there is to it, and I think that is vaguely self-evident. On the other hand, you canât go overboard about it. We are the important organisms. Itâs us discussing the environment and other animals, and not the other way around.â
âTo our knowledge,â I interjectedâmeaning that we could not be sure that other species were not discussing us. But this did not stop his train of thought. He said that we had to learn to live with other species, and he referred to the work of a fellow member of the Royal Society who had carried out hormonal studies on deer that had been hunted; it showed beyond doubt that these animals were extremely frightened. Trewavas now views hunting animals for pleasure as a lack of respect for life. It was simply untrue, he said, that foxes enjoy a good hunt before being torn to pieces. I found nothing to argue with there.
We returned to his office to wrap up the interview. I asked him about future research on plant intelligence. What remained to be done, he said, was to work out how the whole plant assesses its circumstances, makes a decision, and changes what it is doing in response to the environment it perceives. âThat requires a lot of communication between the various parts of a plant. It has become an extremely complex area, remarkably complicated. And I can see that we have underestimated this in the past to an enormous extent. People are going to have to keep working on this and try to appreciate that what they are looking at, in fact, is an organism that does exhibit intelligent behavior, and not in ways they normally perceive intelligence.â
It was still not clear to me how and where computation occurs in a plant. According to a view Trewavas had expressed in writing, âplant communication is likely to be as complex as within a brain.â I told him that when I read that sentence, I pictured the whole plant as a kind of brain.
âYes, thatâs interesting,â he said. Then he began comparing the chemical signals used by neurons to those used by plants cells. Some are the same, but others are different. Brain signals tend to be small molecules, whereas plant signals tend to be large and complicated, such as proteins and RNA transcripts. This had only become clear in the last five years, he said.