598. Do plants have intelligence?

 It has been written that plants have intelligence. I think that is misguided.

 Plants do have an impressive ability to adapt. Green plants grow upward to the light. Their roots grow downwards. Flowers open at daybreak and close at night. They have colours that change, and spread odours and offer honey to attract insects for pollination. They are adaptive in many ways, but this does not prove intelligence. I have proposed to use the notions of ‘assimilation’, absorption of features of the environment, into existing frames of response, and ‘accommodation’ of those frames. Intelligence requires both, but plants only have assimilation.

 How do programs of action arise? Adaptive capabilities arose from evolution. In animals DNA does not directly yield properties, but recipes for the production of proteins, which are distributed by RNA. DNA yields a variety of recipes for making proteins, in a repertoire of response. The environment determines which recipe is triggered. This has been called ‘gene expression’, which yields ‘plasticity’ Plants also have this adaptive ability. In contrast with plants, people, and to a lesser extent animals, in addition have the ability to generate new recipes in response to their environment, in other words accommodation, reconstituting recipes of conduct. Plants cannot do that. For them, repertoires of recipes change only in evolution.

 Operating recipes that were developed in evolution, is ‘instinctive’, inborn. Human beings, and to some extent animals, can go beyond instinct In other words, change of response can be ‘ontogenetic’, in the life of the individual, while with plants it is only ‘phylogenetic’.

 Plants have also been said to ‘communicate’, but interaction is not yet communication. Intelligence is strongly connected to the use of language, where new sentences can be constructed almost infinitely, with words that can change meaning. Some animals have that in some form, such as whales, tunas, and some birds. Plants don’t.

 People and some animals have self-consciousness. Elephants do, and even some fish. This has been proven by painting a stain on their skin and putting them in front of a mirror. They move a bit to better inspect the stain, and try to remove it. My cat does not have a clue, and claws the mirror to try and enter the space reflected in it.