Planck E PressCenter Articles

• Home
• Articles
• Press Releases
• Reports

---

Why Do Plants Have No Faces?

“Interestingly, the word, intelligence, comes from the Latin

inter legere.  It means, simply, to choose.”

Stephen Harrod Buhner

 

Why do plants have no faces?  If we accept the extremely serious, inflexible, and boring scientific proposal, we started long before the Cambrian, when the Nature of today was defined: one billion years ago, considering the 3.5 billion years of life on Earth.  Earth's coarse multicellular organisms split into two groups, one with a radially symmetrical structure (top and bottom, but not front and back) and one with bilateral symmetry, with the right and left sides, mirroring the other side, ending in a head.  And there we go.

Or we can take the path of the unorthodox, brilliant, and daring Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso, whose perspective on the plant world borders on poetry.

In his book The Roots of Plant Intelligence, Mancuso performs a somersault of thought by suggesting that plants did not exist until the Cambrian explosion, at most some lichens and algae.  Well, after the explosion 500 million years ago, it is estimated that today there are 100,000 species of trees and that the flora accounts for about 80% of the Earth's living mass.

First of all, Mancuso claims that a plant is not an animal, and he claims that his claim is trite.  But he does this so that we can open our minds -from our idea that Complexity in Nature is closely related to animals- to what he has to say by referring to a model constructed in a different way.

Obviously, there is a common ancestor in the evolutionary process, but the grandfather we share with plants died in the Cambrian explosion.  The evolution of animals took the path of movement, of radial or bilateral symmetry, with organic systems -which reach great sophistication- of cooperative organisms, wrapped in a shell of scales/feathers/fur/skin and topped by a head where a sense of self-awareness occurs, leading -at least- to sentience.

In turn, plants chose to take root and feed on sunlight, and this option led to a very different evolutionary process for this animal.  Mancuso suggests that this is why plants have no faces, and no limbs; therefore there is no possible identification with us because we only understand what is similar to us.

Recent Presscenter Articles

• The Parametrization of Science

• A Scientific Impossibility

• The Unsustainable Stability of the Atom

• The Bell-Curve and the Neutron

---

Planck E - Books

---

For further information about Planck E PressCenter, please contact us.