Stripped of anthropocentric (and zoocentric) interpretations, a growing body of research indicates that many sophisticated behaviors traditionally assumed to be exclusive to animals are present in the Plantae kingdom too, including light and nutrient foraging, competition avoidance, and complex decision-making. Together with cell differentiation and development, they allow plants to respond adaptively to their local environments (Hopkins & Hüner, 2008). Growth and turgor changes deliver respectively irreversible and reversible patterns of motion. To move around, plants rely on differential patterns of growth within and across organs, and on turgor-based changes of volume within cells. All higher plants, angiosperms and gymnosperms alike, “move,” if only their movement differs from canonical animal locomotion. 1īesides, locomotion is but one form of movement.
Whereas the former resorted to locomotion, the latter became photosynthetic through the acquisition of a blue green algal symbiont (Calvo et al., 2017), resulting in their sessile and autotroph lifestyle. Primordial animal and plant cells found different ways to eke out their living.
Plausibly, behavioral divergences were already found in the first eukaryotic cells. Evolutionarily speaking, animals and plants separated at the single cell stage. To begin with, locomoting and nonlocomoting organisms resort to different strategies to achieve their own ends, these differences being caused by their contingent and differing energy demands. Yet locomotion appears to be uninformative as a way to draw a plant/animal dividing cognitive line (Linson & Calvo, 2020).
In this review, we shall focus on higher, vascular plants, although the type of considerations herewith presented may well apply more broadly (Baluška & Reber, 2019 Baluška & Reber, 2021).Ĭognition and consciousness are standardly thought of as exclusive to some locomoting animals. Despite the focus being usually placed upon vertebrates (one out of 34 phyla in the kingdom Animalia), we may enlarge the picture on “evolutionary continuity” grounds (Griffin, 1976) and consider the evolution of cognitive behaviors in some other of the 96 phyla that compose the tree of life. Neither cognition nor consciousness appears to have evolved de novo in humans (or in non-human animals for that matter-Calvo et al., 2020 Calvo & Trewavas, 2020a, 2020b). Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition.In sum, we invite the reader to consider the idea that if consciousness boils down to some form of biological adaptation, we should not exclude a priori the possibility that plants have evolved their own phenomenal experience of the world.
#Plant sentience and consciousness series#
To conclude, we shall present a series of approaches to scientifically investigate plant consciousness. Research on plant electrical and chemical signaling can help shed light into the biological bases for plant sentience. After reviewing the empirical literature concerning plant cognition, we introduce the reader to the emerging field of plant neurobiology. The goal of this article is not to provide a positive argument for plant cognition and consciousness, but to invite a constructive, empirically informed debate about it. Yet, if plants can be considered cognitive, even in a minimal sense, can they also be considered conscious? Some authors defend that the quest for plant consciousness is worth pursuing, under the premise that sentience can play a role in facilitating plant's sophisticated behavior. This view nonetheless clashes with a growing body of empirical research that shows that many sophisticated cognitive capabilities traditionally assumed to be exclusive to animals are exhibited by plants too. Under this assumption, plants are usually considered to be noncognitive organisms. Unlike animal behavior, behavior in plants is traditionally assumed to be completely determined either genetically or environmentally.
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