Georeactor Blog

In 2005, a group of plant scientists started the Plant Neurobiology Society. After some scoffing and grumbling in the biology / botany world, the organization was renamed to the Society of Plant Signaling and Behavior a few years later. They continue to publish an open-access research journal on PubMed.

Despite thousands of years of agriculture (RIP James C. Scott), people continue to be perplexed by weird plants. The South American Boquila trifoliolata is known to mimic the shape of leaves in its vicinity. Among several hypotheses about what makes this trick possible (chemistry? horizontal gene transfer?), a 2022 paper in Plant Signaling and Behavior argued that it will even mimic a plastic plant. and cited 1900s papers about eye-like structures. This news got into my Twitter / YouTube / Reddit-and-YouTube-rips-of-TikTok info bubble, mostly unquestioned.
It's a fascinating idea, but it isn't until you sit with it for a minute that you ask - do I think that plants really have eyes?

I flash back to middle school science projects on light, music, and talking to plants. Here's a local news story on one project where a class's plant was "bullied".

For context, let's take a look at some Plant Signaling papers from 2024. This one is a history and survey of the "plant neurobiology movement", really a good intro for all beliefs. The group is an umbrella covering three neglected fields: "plant ethology, plant comparative psychology and whole plant electrophysiology". Of these, comparative psychology is particularly interesting: "goal-directed and anticipatory behaviors, learning, cognition, memory and sentience".

Note: This subfield seems to be the main focus of debunkers. A 2019 paper in Cell is titled "Plants Neither Possess nor Require Consciousness"

Memory and learning can cover a lot of interactions and reactions to stimuli. I think the question would be whether the "learning" involves more complex thought or goals.
Note: the paper also mentions a 1970s book The Secret Life of Plants which put the movement into public consciousness but without scientific backing - are you telling me that this the origin of Secret Life of Pets?

Then there's a paper on pre-Columbian mentions of maize in Arabic texts. Maize originating in the Levant would go against most historical accounts and any genetic explanations of how humans domesticated maize.

The plant people do seem genuinely nice; they write about plant signaling testing in classrooms around the world, and more regular research like tolerance to cold. Unfortunately this also leaves me feeling uneasy about Plant Signaling's role in a publish-or-perish world. I mean… how aware are researchers at the _ Academy of Agricultural Sciences that they are publishing in the plant parapsychology journal?

Anyway, every strange pop science story is an offshoot of something stranger.