Le piante sono esseri intelligenti? Partendo da questa semplice domanda Stefano Mancuso e Alessandra Viola conducono il lettore in un inconsueto e affascinante viaggio intorno al mondo vegetale. In generale, le piante potrebbero benissimo vivere senza di noi. Noi invece senza di loro ci estingueremmo in breve tempo. Eppure persino nella nostra lingua, e in quasi tutte le altre, espressioni come “vegetare” o “essere un vegetale” sono passate a indicare condizioni di vita ridotte ai minimi termini. “Vegetale a chi?”… Se le piante potessero parlare, forse sarebbe questa una delle prime domande che ci farebbero.
Verde brillante. Sensibilità e intelligenza del mondo vegetale
di Stefano Mancuso e Alessandra Viola
by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola
translated by Joan Benham
Are plants intelligent? Can they solve problems, communicate, and navigate their surroundings? Or are they passive, incapable of independent action or social behavior? Philosophers and scientists have pondered these questions since ancient Greece, most often concluding that plants are unthinking and inert: they are too silent, too sedentary — just too different from us. Yet discoveries over the past fifty years have challenged these ideas, shedding new light on the extraordinary capabilities and complex interior lives of plants.
In Brilliant Green, Stefano Mancuso, a leading scientist and founder of the field of plant neurobiology, presents a new paradigm in our understanding of the vegetal world. Combining a historical perspective with the latest in plant science, Mancuso argues that, due to cultural prejudices and human arrogance, we continue to underestimate plants. In fact, they process information, sleep, remember, and signal to one another — showing that, far from passive machines, plants are intelligent and aware. Through a survey of plant capabilities from sight and touch to communication, Mancuso challenges our notion of intelligence, presenting a vision of plant life that is more sophisticated than most imagine.
Plants have much to teach us, from network building to innovations in robotics and man-made materials — but only if we understand more about how they live. Part botany lesson, part manifesto, Brilliant Green is an engaging and passionate examination of the inner workings of the plant kingdom.
Introduction
Are plants intelligent? Do they solve problems and communicate with their surroundings—with other plants, insects, and higher animals? Or are they passive, unfeeling organisms without a trace of individual or social behavior?
Differing answers to such questions date back to ancient Greece, when philosophers of opposing schools of thought argued for and against the proposition that plants have a “soul.” What drove their reasoning? And above all, after centuries of scientific discovery, why is there still disagreement about whether plants are intelligent? Surprisingly, many of the points raised today are the same ones raised centuries ago, and hinge not on science but on sentiment and cultural preconceptions that have existed for thousands of years.
Although casual observation may suggest that the plant world’s level of complexity is pretty low, over the centuries the idea that plants are sentient organisms which can communicate, have a social life, and solve problems by using elegant strategies—that they are, in a word, intelligent—has occasionally raised its head. Philosophers and scientists in different times and cultural contexts (from Democritus to Plato, from Linnaeus to Darwin, from Fechner to Bose, to mention only some of the best known) have embraced the belief that plants have much more complicated abilities than are commonly observable.
Until the mid-twentieth century there were only brilliant intuitions. But discoveries over the past fifty years have finally shed light on this subject, compelling us to see the plant would with new eyes. In the first chapter we’ll explain this, and we’ll see that even today, arguments for denying plants’ intelligence rely less on scientific data than on cultural prejudices and influences that have persisted for millennia.
The time seems ripe for a change in our thinking. On the basis of decades of experiments, plants are starting to be regarded as beings capable of calculation and choice, learning and memory. A few years ago, Switzerland, amid much less rational polemics, became the first country in the world to affirm the rights of plants with a special declaration.
But what are plants, really, and how did they come to be the way that they are? We humans have lived with them from the time we appeared on Earth, yet we can’t say we know them at all. This isn’t just a scientific or cultural problem; it goes much deeper. The relationship between humans and plants is so difficult because our evolutionary paths have been so different.
Like all animals, humans are endowed with unique organs, and thus every human being is an indivisible organism. But plants are sessile—they can’t move from one place to another—and so they’ve evolved in a different way, constructing a modular body without individual organs. The reason for such a “solution” is obvious: if an herbivorous predator removed an organ whose function couldn’t be performed by another part of the plant, that ipso facto would cause the plant’s death.
**
Plants could live very well without us, in general. But without them we would die out very quickly. And yet in many languages (including our own), expressions such as “to vegetate” or “to be a vegetable” are used to indicate a condition of life reduced to the minimum.
“Vegetable, to whom?” . . . If plants could speak, maybe that would be one of their first questions to us.
by ステファノ・マンクーゾ, アレッサンドラ・ヴィオラ
translated by 久保耕司
人と違うのは「動かない」ということだけ
「植物に知性はあるのか?」この問いをめぐって、はるか昔から論争がくり広げられてきた。トマトは虫に襲われると、化学物質を放出して周囲の仲間に危険を知らせる。マメ科の植物は細菌と共生し、それぞれにとって必要な栄養分を交換しあう。動けないからこそ、植物は植物独自の“社会”を築き、ここまで地球上に繁栄してきた。その知略に富んだ生き方を、植物学の世界的第一人者が長年にわたり科学的に分析し、はじめて明らかにした刺激的な一冊。本書を一読すれば、畑の野菜も観葉植物も、もう今までと同じ目では見られなくなるだろう。