Plants are People, Too

What Can Plants Do?

I haven't written a blog post since 2017. I've missed it, but, well, life has intervened. But, I've just read The Light Eaters, by Zöe Schlanger, a book describing a tidal wave of new thinking about plant behavior, and it has moved me to write.  It's a New York Times bestseller.  It's exciting stuff.  

Schlanger writes of research on plants that seem to make decisions, that plan ahead, plants that anticipate where light will be when, altruistic plants, plants that treat close kin better than distant kin or unrelated plants, vines that can mimic the plants they are parasitizing, plants that seem to have some way to "see," though it's not at all clear what the mechanism would be, she describes eusocial plants, in which, like bees, some contribute to the survival of others without reproducing themselves, plants that emit the exact chemical to attract parasites of insects that have attacked them, roots that seem to forage.  Ultimately, she wonders whether plants might have the equivalent of a brain, a centralized organizing something.  Many others ponder the same question.  Schlanger eventually asks if the entire plant is equivalent to a brain but, again, the mechanism is a puzzle.  

And there's so much more.  

The author is very measured in her discussion of what all these new findings might mean.  She cautions about the importance of the traditional scientific method and of questioning results. She reminds us that The Secret Life of Plants, by Tomkins and Bird, published in 1973, was an "irresponsible, best-selling book that nearly snuffed out the field for good." That book told us that plants have emotions, they prefer Beethoven to rock-and-roll, they can read our minds, and so on.  It was quickly debunked.  

Serious botanists who are thinking about plant behavior these days want to be very careful not to be taken for similar fantasists.  The young field of plant neurobiology applies generally accepted methods to ask how plants process the information they glean from their environment, and it's these kinds of results that Schlanger reports in her book.

Schlanger is a journalist.  She's not producing new findings herself, she's writing about them, as are many others.  A June 11 essay by Rachael Petersen in Aeon asks "Do Plants Have Minds?"  She writes about Gustav Theodor Fechner, a 19th century intellectual from Saxony who contemplated this question.  

He reminds me that the best way to apprehend the unseen in plants is to take off the blindfold and look. He reminds me that what we stand to gain by looking at nature with new eyes is nothing short of the world, and nothing short of each other.

Looking at nature with new eyes seems to be just what's happening in much of Botany.   

But, there are cautions.  E.g., an April 23 piece by Daniel Immerwahr, in The Guardian, warns that a lot of the data are being over-interpreted (the importance of the underground fungal network between trees, in particular) but that there are many interesting discoveries being made. And, he writes respectfully of Schlanger's book.  

So, the question of what to make of all these new observations of plant behavior is in the air but we are far from a deep understanding.  I like this Wikipedia discussion of the Chilean Boquila trifoliolata plant, a vine that mimics other plants, even plants it didn't evolve anywhere near, which Schlanger discusses at length, and even visits in Chile. 

The exact mechanism by which mimicry occurs is not well understood but may involve chemical, odor, genetic, metagenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, epigenetic, and/or microbial cues to identify and mimic the species it is attached to.

It would seem that the inexact mechanism by which mimicry occurs is not well understood, either.  

Anthropomorphizing

People who study non-human life have long been careful about anthropomorphizing their study subjects.  But, this seems to be changing.  There's an interesting June 6 piece in The Atlantic by Katherine J. Wu about this. She suggests that, by denying human characteristics to other living beings, we may be missing important truths about their behavior.  

Schlanger notes repeatedly that botany has a history of discouraging the anthropomorphizing of plants. And yet, it is possible that there's no better, or even no other language in which to describe the new discoveries.  There seems to be a new openness to applying what we know about humans to plants.  If we strip all life down to organisms that strive to survive and reproduce, maybe that's as it should be.  We are all trying to solve the same problems; knowing where we are in space, finding food, spotting danger and figuring out ways to avoid it, finding mates, or otherwise reproducing.  Let's throw in protecting kin, sensing our environment, and solving problems.  We all do at least some of that, even single-celled organisms.   

So, let's assume that the results reported in this book are verifiable, and even revolutionary. Plants really can do all these things, and more, and it is meaningful to describe them in human terms. Let's keep looking, and cataloguing and generalizing.  

But, will anthropomorphizing plants get us anywhere?  We still don't really understand human, or, generally, primate behavior. We're still squabbling over whether it's genes or environment, so once we describe plants in our terms, have we actually understood them any better? And, how would we know?

Oh Koko!

We'll be sharing much more, in the coming months, about why Anne and I are a wee bit obsessed with Koko the gorilla. She's one of the stars of a project we've got going--a project that will likely diminish our chances of ever meeting the lovely and extraordinary creature.

It's because we've been stalking Koko that Anne and I were perplexed, but not surprised, by this recent piece in The Atlantic:

Click here for the article.

Our eyebrows arched just reading the headline.

It leads a reader to anticipate a conversation with Koko the gorilla, but instead it is mostly an interview with Koko's main human, Penny Patterson. So, I guess the headline is describing what that interview is about--a conversation about conversing. There's no other way to make sense of it. Yet, it's still problematic because gorillas don't converse. Not even Koko.

The piece begins with an anecdote about Koko describing herself with the "queen" sign. Morin, the article's author, follows it with this quote of explanation from Patterson:

Koko understands that she’s special because of all the attention she's had from professors, and caregivers, and the media.

And this is where, to my mind, any interviewer actually fascinated with Koko's mind asks: This is amazing...how could Koko understand that she receives more human attention than most other gorillas on the planet? And how does she make the connection between this concept, this existence of hers, and that of a queen? When you taught her "queen," what was the definition? 

Unfortunately, this isn't the direction the piece goes. That nugget was a foray into her backstory about her sign language training and her home in California.  And just because the written product of Morin's interview doesn't dive into questions like those italicized up there, it doesn't mean it didn't. But if he did go there, why on earth didn't that gold make it into the piece?

More to the point, why have I never read an interview about Koko that asks penetrating questions about the stories that Koko's humans tell about her mind? Is that nuts and bolts stuff merely uninteresting fodder for readers or is it off-limits to writers who are permitted access? There's an answer at the end of this blog post.

But first, I have more, seemingly infinite, questions... How does Koko's language ability, and let's add Kanzi's too, compare to a highly-trained border collie like Chaser?



Is it categorically different, indicating an actually different kind of cognition?
You might be thinking about this video of Kanzi and saying, yes, yes it's different:



But how is it different? Kanzi is just pairing up two things, which is not really all that different from Chaser getting one toy at a time. It might appear to be more extraordinary than it is because in pairing the two objects for which Kanzi knows the English words, he behaves with them in ways they're meant to be behaved with by people.

That was a sentence worthy of a tinier brain than mine.

What I'm trying to say, poorly, with my human language "abilities," is that grabbing two things, like a soap pumper and a ball, and behaving routinely with one of them (like pumping the soap, which is what one does with a soap pumper) doesn't necessarily require as much human-like comprehension of what Sue's saying as a we might assume--that is, without thinking it through more deeply, or perhaps without trying to think like a dog or like a bonobo, or like a toddler.

Or like a gorilla--a gorilla who's arguably not a gorilla, given she's not socialized like one and given how her humans have admitted that they've intentionally raised her as a human and consider her one:



As they've raised Koko, they've narrated her mind as if it works like ours.This is evident right from the beginning of the interview portion of Morin's article. Patterson is explaining how Koko generalized the sign for "food", saying:

She would perch on this high spot where she could watch people come and go and she would sign “food” to them. It might mean “Give me the treat you’ve got,” or it might mean “I want my toothbrush,” or even just, “Engage with me.” She understood that signs had power. That particular sign got her food, so she wondered, “What else can I do with it?

She did? She wondered? And it was about how to use a sign in different settings to get what she wants? It's not just simply that it's something she could produce and did, in various circumstances? I think describing such processes as "wondering" would be giving humans too much conscious credit most of the time. But it's how we talk about minds. It's how we narrate one another's behaviors, and that of our pets, and that of whatever Koko is.

Often this is lumped into "anthropomorphism" and it's not all bad, but one could argue that it's to be avoided like the plague. If the goal is to understand how an animal thinks, then anthropomorphism risks being more of an obstacle than a helpful metaphor.

Whether the Koko project is scientifically rigorous, I have absolutely no idea. But Patterson's fantasy description of wild gorilla communication rings more of science fiction:

The free-living gorillas might talk about simple things like “Where are we going to get our next meal?” but here [at the research facility] there is so much more to talk about.

Death is one of those things. Here's Patterson's evidence that Koko understands things about death:

The caregiver showed Koko a skeleton and asked, “Is this alive or dead?” Koko signed, “Dead, draped.” “Draped” means “covered up.” 

Again, this is where my dream interviewer asks, What is the connection between "dead" and "draped"? It's even harder to understand the connection between a skeleton and draped. Can you help us understand the logic of her language? 

But we're not given that in this piece.  Morin does follow with "How would Koko know about death?" but it's not demanding a response that gets at the crucial connection between her mind and her signs.

We need to know whether what Patterson says about Koko's mind is true or not and no one seems to be able to  help us learn this. As the piece continues, my desperation for such a person escalates.

Patterson describes how Koko was making a sign that her brother made just before jumping off a rock. It took Koko's people a while to understand what she was trying to say because they hadn't seen her brother do this, but once they saw a film, it was apparent that the sign...

...means “take off” in the sense of “jump off.” Koko wanted us to take off our lab coats.

How does Koko's mind connect "jump off" a rock with "take off" your lab coats? If Morin asked this, he neither published it nor the answer. If Morin asked this question, then he is hoarding the gold all to himself.

The rest of Morin's piece is fascinating, and in parts it's heart-warming, especially if you have a soft spot for gorillas and for people who have those soft spots too. But there's still no conversation with a gorilla, or a conversation about a conversation either.

Read far enough into the article and you'll see what happened to Morin as he prepared to meet Koko:

Patterson cautioned me earlier to refrain from asking Koko questions. I was to let the gorilla take the lead. “She has that royal air about her,” the researcher explained, “and she doesn't entertain questions. Just like you wouldn’t question the queen—Koko is the same way. She’ll disengage.”

So, no conversation is going to be had with an ape, conveniently, because that totally capable ape wouldn't like it if he tried. Hm.

But there would be some lovely and touching moments through the enclosure's fence.

After recounting those, Morin reflects on what I've been discussing:

There was no way to know how much of her behavior was intentional and how much was my own or Patterson’s projection. Allegations of selective interpretation have accompanied ape-language research from the beginning. Still, it was impossible to be there interacting with her, and not feel that I was in the presence of another self-conscious being.

I don't see anything wrong with describing her as self-conscious while also doubting that her mind works like ours.  I live with a one-year old. And even before I had this baby, before I lived with an alien mind, I didn't see anything wrong with this thinking. Morin's final thoughts compare Koko's mind to an alien's, but his piece paints that alien as just another Hollywood humanoid.

When you share the link to Morin's The Atlantic piece on Facebook, the headline in the feed reads: "What gorillas can teach us about being human"

Well, what can they?

I think it's obvious from the article, and from others like it, that Koko is teaching us about our limitations. She's teaching us that we wouldn't care as much about gorillas without her fairytales; that we wouldn't care as much about these truly magnificent animals if they weren't furry humans. And that would be less depressing if we were any good at caring about actual humans.

lolhumans

"This pelican looks like a urinal. 
Go home, evolution, you are drunk." 
(wtfevolution.tumblr) 

Urinalification is so lol.

But it's calling evolution drunk that really got you, isn't it?

Steven Pinker (as of the late 90s) might say that personifying evolution's funny because it juxtaposes or mixes up what are normally separate rules or domains of our intuition. Personification's funny the way slapstick comedy's funny: Without any warning (but with a well-placed banana peel) a guy goes from being a dad to being a bag of molecules.When we give nonhumans human potential, Pinker says that we’re marrying “our intuitive psychology to our intuitive biology.” [1]

Personification is the same sort of thinking that enables us to discover, to know, to understand how the world works. It’s story, analogy, metaphor, unseen imaginative b.s. that we misfire like crazy. And even though we've overcome much of our reliance on it, we tend to preserve the spirit of it anyway. 

The powers of life, death and destruction aren't the only things worthy of personification. We'll give agency to a triangle or square. Just shapes. Being two-dimensional and moving around is all it takes. We are constantly up to this and as Dawkins said, 

“The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world, and moles live in an underground world, and water striders live in a surface-tension dominated flatland, we live in a social world. We swim through a sea of people. … We are evolved to second guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it’s a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful goal seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt and blameworthiness. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it’s hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we’re trying to think about entities for which it’s not appropriate, …”[2]

Although many other animals have desires and pleasures and pains and generally have experiences—at least they do as long as we assume we do—we should extend Dawkins’ reflection to our personification of nonhuman animals. There's very good reason we do this as scientists. It's not a terrible null hypothesis that if you observe an animal behaving like a human could, then it might be thinking like a human could. This is the argument by analogy or as I call it doing demonstrates knowing. How else could you reverse engineer cognition? You're a human, you think like one, you know how humans think from a scientific perspective better than you know how any other animal thinks. This makes sense. It's a good default. But that's all it is. And scientists get that. They taught me all this after all. (Reading a lot of Shettleworth, Povinelli, and Tomasello lately.) But the rest of us who don't work on animal behavior and who have very little experience with real animals at all are taking this perspective literally without caution. For example, maybe we should perk our ears but cock our heads skeptically when the website for Dognition (a service rooted in good science that sells cognitive testing for your furry friends) says, “Learning who your dog is as a ‘person’ will help you make the most of the time you spend together.”

Sometimes anthropomorphism smells like money and sometimes it makes us angry for no good reason. For example. Ed Yong wrote a piece "Male frog extracts and fertilises eggs from dead female" about an Amazonian frog that bleeps to death and still procreates. (No survival necessary--take that, Darwin!) Yong didn't personify the frogs but that didn't stop a reader. 

And thanks to the delightful woman who accused me of misogyny for my piece on the necrophiliac frogs. They. Are. Frogs.
— Ed Yong(@edyong209) March 1, 2013

I have a hunch that our habit of anthropomorphizing (combined with some empathic and also narcissistic tendencies) makes it much harder for us to understand reality, to understand scientific explanations for the universe, and to stumble onto new ones.

I wonder a lot about how our language encourages these mistaken habits. I've written before about how I don't use "force" to describe processes and mechanisms of evolutionary change. It's one of my f-words of evolution.

I've got similar concerns about our language that describes animal behavior. Take for example this fascinating paragraph written by the primatologist Toshisada Nishida about the chimpanzees he studied at Mahale, Tanzania:

“In an effort to maximize their reproductive output, males and females may cooperate when it is to their mutual advantage. However they may also control, manipulate, betray and even attack each other when they have conflicting interests. Chimpanzees maintain a promiscuous mating system, for which females develop a huge swelling of sexual skin and males large scrota. These morphological features make sperm competition the characteristic features of chimpanzee sexual activity. Males are expected to mate with as many females as possible, while female are expected to be more choosey because reproductive output over their lifetime is more limited. A powerful constraint on female chimpanzees is the need to consider males’ tendencies toward infanticide.”[3]

I added those italics to emphasize the language that could be interpreted to give chimpanzees more cognitive ability and more agency than the author intended or has evidence for. That paragraph, re-written to avoid any overstatement of chimpanzee cognition and any hint of calculated intention by chimps or by Mother Nature, could look like this:

In a system where higher reproductive output means more of whatever traits lead to it in future generations, males and females may behave cooperatively because it has been perpetuated by higher reproductive output in the past and will continue to do so until something changes. However, depending on the circumstance, they may also control, manipulate, betray and even attack each other if cooperation is supplanted by another behavior that is and has been perpetuated due to its increase of reproductive output, instead, in that sort of circumstance in the chimpanzee’s life. Chimpanzees maintain a promiscuous mating system and, because higher reproductive output of females with huge sex swellings and males with large scrota, females have huge sex swellings and males have large scrota. These morphological features exist, as hypothesized, because sperm competition has been occurring over chimpanzee evolutionary history. Males that mate with as many females as possible have, and have had, higher reproductive output, while females mate less frequently and have much more limited procreative potential over their lifetimes, so they appear to be choosier than males about their copulatory partners because doing so (assuming they are actually choosier than males) has and does increase reproductive output. A powerful influence on female chimpanzee mating behavior is males’ tendencies toward infanticide because females who have babies that are killed have lower reproductive outputs.

There. I managed to suck all the fun out of chimp sex. Not only that, but if you made it far enough you must be wondering how I could be so circumspect about female mate choice. That’s something for another day, but let’s just say that we should be circumspect about male choosiness too since they can’t decide which females (or males, or other circumstances) will give them erections.

Oh, hello! Now you’re awake! Why did my translation of Nishida’s paragraph fail to engage you? Here’s a try: Because it wasn’t a narrative and there were no interesting actors with calculating minds raging with intentions. There was nobody to figure out, to empathize with, to love, to fear, to root for. You just don’t tell stories without those kinds of characters.

But listen up close: that’s the true story of most of Earth’s evolutionary history. Agency evolved (maybe), but evolution itself did nothing purposefully, or even whimsically, to cause it.

Left to our naïve devices, how we talk and write about animal behavior affects how we think about their truths, their essences. The animals we put on the big screen are now just CGI manipulated reality--no cartoon drawings necessary for a pig like Babe to politely request sheep to scram, or for the pups in Space Buddies to bark interstellar commands. If only they had our mouths and throats these creatures could tell us about all the complex thoughts and feelings they experience! My mom has named this the Disney Syndrome. Some might blame the fertile “lolcats” and other such memes. We don’t just anthropomorphize animals, though, we personify oak trees, grandfather clocks, and toenail fungus.

Let's not pile all the blame our limited language, our love of agent-driven narrative, our teachers, scientists and Disney. Because how removed we are from “nature” probably affects our perceptions of animals too. Urban and suburban Americans might be the worst about this. In a piece about Joe Henrich's work, Watters writes,

“While studying children from the U.S., researchers have suggested a developmental timeline for what is called “folkbiological reasoning.” These studies posit that it is not until children are around 7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals and begin to understand that humans are one animal among many. Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood. Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world.”

Nobody's saying to give it up completely. It's adorable.It's funny. It's lovely, actually. But if we coddle it like crazy in our children and if we don't check it once in a while in ourselves, this cultural phenomenon is going to continue to contribute handily to the scientific challenges that we face with increasing urgency.

Before submitting a scientific manuscript about animal behavior, evolution, climate, or any process that tempts us to infuse agency, make sure it's not drunk.

---

[1] From Pinker's lecture "How the mind works" published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

[2] Richard Dawkins's TED talk at about 21:00 - http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html

[3] Nishida, T. (2012) Chimpanzees of the Lakeshore (Cambridge University Press), p. 201