This article is reprinted, with the author’s permission, from National Review.

Periodically, the mainstream media focus on advocacy for the idea that plants are intelligent and/or moral beings. For example, the New York Times ran a column some years back asserting that peas are persons. Why? Pea plants release chemicals in the soil that alert other pea plants of drought conditions. And then there was that time a Times science writer claimed that plants are the “ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun.”

Well, the notion of plants as having intelligence is being pushed again, this time in the Atlantic, in an interview with a staff writer named Zoë Schlanger who has a book coming out soon about “the unseen world of plant intelligence.”

Apparently, botanists are debating the concept. From an interview with her on the podcast, Radio Atlantic, under the title, “If Plants Could Talk”: 

The main debate is: Are plants behaving intentionally? Are plants behaving at all? Can they be said to behave when something doesn’t have a mind? You get into all these murky discussions of what intelligence really means. If intelligence means responding in a way that has a good future outcome, then there’s probably a good argument for that.

We all know that plants respond to stimuli, such as flowers opening with the sun or growing toward light. A Venus flytrap will close on and digest its insect prey. Apparently, according to the interview, some also respond to vibrations that the human brain would interpret as sound. But that isn’t intelligence or consciousness in any meaningful sense of the term, as Schlanger essentially admits when she says, “They’re not intelligent in the way we expect ourselves to be intelligent.”

Still, she wrestles with her conscience because she keeps house plants:

I have come to some amount of consternation around this because after I did a lot of research around plant communication and how plants interact with other organisms below ground, how their roots are hooked in with fungi and other microbes, and how there’s all this information being transferred below ground. And then I look over to my many houseplants sitting in their discrete pots.

But I am soothed a bit because I’m looking at all these plants in my Brooklyn apartment, and they are all tropical varieties that have been raised in nurseries for probably generations.

And when you raise a plant in optimal conditions for several generations, it loses its hardiness. These plants are not going to survive without us at this point, the ones in our houses.

Absolvo te!

But what about harming plants in the wild? She opines that it is okay to mow the lawn because plants are “modular” — that is, you can cut parts of them off and it doesn’t kill them. Good grief. In this, I was reminded of the Swiss Constitution which has recognized the “dignity” of individual plants and an ethics report that opined it is immoral to “decapitate” a wildflower.

It seems to me that the ultimate point of these “plants are persons too”–type stories is to undermine human exceptionalism:

So, we draw these kind of lines in the sand between animals and plants. And then within animals, we draw lines in the sand between intelligent animals and dumb animals. And, you know, it seems like every year we start admitting new animals into this category of creatures we consider intelligent or conscious—I mean, dogs and dolphins. And, you know, it’s been only a decade or so since we’ve accepted those things as conscious.

Animal consciousness in the human sense isn’t universally accepted, but I digress.

So how much farther down that ladder do you look in a way? What’s, like, past insects?

What happens if we include plants in those categories? That opens up a lot of moral considerations. And then you have the potential for something like what we’ve seen with animal-rights movements.

It brings up the question of what happens if we have a plant-rights movement, which is actually something that legal experts are writing and thinking about right now. It introduces this interesting idea: What do we do about the fact that we’re animals that need to eat plants? There’s just no way around that.

You eat them. More:

It does introduce this kind of sense of wonder, that plants are no longer a background decoration in my life. They’re no longer this kind of general wash of green. I’m really aware that there’s all these individuals. There’s all of these distinct species. There’s all of this biological creativity, all this kind of evolutionary nuance that is playing out all around me.

You know, it has the effect of unseating us a little bit from this assumption that we’re sitting sort of on the top of the evolutionary heap…

Once you start to realize the incredible evolutionary fine-tuning that goes into plants, it kind shifts the ground beneath humanity to settle us a little more among other species, and it’s a humbling realization that I think our species could use a lot more of.

Quite the contrary. Embracing our uniqueness is essential to embracing our duties as human beings to each other, our posterity, the humane treatment of animals, and proper husbanding of the environment.

It’s also very interesting to me that some of the same people who wax on and on about the intelligence of plants and animals and its moral import — I am not referring to Schlanger since I have no idea about her beliefs — reject the idea that the incredible complexity which they hold in such awe could have been designed by an ultimately intelligent Creator.