Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence by Stefano Mancuso (PDF)

Description

Are plants intelligent? Can they solve problems, communicate, and navigate their surroundings? Or are they passive, incapable of independent action or social behavior? Philosophers and scientists have pondered these questions since ancient Greece, most often concluding that plants are unthinking and inert: they are too silent, too sedentary — just too different from us. Yet discoveries over the past fifty years have challenged these ideas, shedding new light on the extraordinary capabilities and complex interior lives of plants. In Brilliant Green, Stefano Mancuso, a leading scientist and founder of the field of plant neurobiology, presents a new paradigm in our understanding of the vegetal world. Combining a historical perspective with the latest in plant science, Mancuso argues that, due to cultural prejudices and human arrogance, we continue to underestimate plants. In fact, they process information, sleep, remember, and signal to one another — showing that, far from passive machines, plants are intelligent and aware. Through a survey of plant capabilities from sight and touch to communication, Mancuso challenges our notion of intelligence, presenting a vision of plant life that is more sophisticated than most imagine. Plants have much to teach us, from network building to innovations in robotics and man-made materials — but only if we understand more about how they live. Part botany lesson, part manifesto, Brilliant Green is an engaging and passionate examination of the inner workings of the plant kingdom. Financial support for the translation of this book has been provided by SEPS: Segretariato Europeo Per Le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Mancuso may be provocative, but he’s not alone and he hasn’t been for a long time.” ― Washington Post”Mancuso advocates for a second Copernican revolution, of sorts. Just as medieval people had to concede that the stars and planets don’t orbit Earth, we must accept that the living world doesn’t revolve around us.” ― Maclean’s”Mancuso and Viola blaze a trail of intrigue, to study the seemingly inaccessible, to fathom the unfathomable, to celebrate the essence of life on Earth….This book is nothing short of summer reading that broadens the soul.” ― San Francisco Book Review“Brilliant Green… [is a] timely, highly accessible summar[y] of fast-developing fields… Combine[s] a passion for plants and a desire to illustrate their largely unsung complexities with an appreciation of the burden of proof needed to persuade us of a world that contains chlorophyllic sentience.” ― New Scientist”A brilliant fusion of historical and modern research, Brilliant Green is a quirky little book can be quickly read, yet it is captivating and eye-opening, and will make you stop and think. The authors’ fervor and wit jolt the reader out apathetic anthropocentrism and we awaken in the fascinating world of plant intelligence.” ― The Guardian’s GrrlScientist”Brilliant Green.. lays out the case for approaching plants as fellow intelligent life-forms… key insights to fields across the sciences, from botany to robotics.” ― Boston Globe”…a compelling and fascinating case not only for plant sentience and smarts, but also plant rights.” ― Guardian”A short primer/manifesto on the history and science of the [plant intelligence movement].” ― Salon”Read this book: it informs and excites the mind. Exuberantly translated from Italian by Joan Benham, Brilliant Green can be read in a sitting…an excellent work.” ― Biologist”…Mancuso, a leading scientist and founder of the field of plant neurobiology, presents a new paradigm in our understanding of the vegetal world.” ― EarthTalk”[Brilliant Green] is an interesting book about plant intelligence with amazing examples of how plants routinely interact with their surroundings.” ― Wildlife Activist”…an engaging and passionate examination of the inner workings of the plant kingdom” ― Davie Mustangs See The World”Slim and engaging.” ― MinnPost”Fascinating…Written in a lively, accessible way, Brilliant Green will appeal to anyone who loves plants…and isn’t that all of us?” ― Gardening Australia”Referring to ground-breaking scientific studies and historical perspectives, the authors shake up our views of the plant world—one that we are totally dependent on for oxygen and food, and one that we cannot afford to take for granted.” ― Nexus”[Brilliant Green] is, like the best science, the product of a powerful imagination, one with the ability to see the world from a completely fresh and unencumbered point of view—and to communicate that perspective to the rest of us. So put aside for a couple of hours your accustomed anthropocentrism, and step into this other, richer and more wonderful world. You won’t regret it, and you won’t emerge from it ever quite the same again.” — From the foreword by Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “The Botany of Desire,” and other books About the Author Stefano Mancuso is the Director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV) in Florence, Italy, a founder of the International Society for Plant Signaling and Behavior, and a professor at the University of Florence. His most recent project is the Jellyfish Barge, a modular floating greenhouse which grows plants through solar-powered seawater desalination, featured in the 2015 Universal Expo in Milan. Mancuso’s books and papers have been published in numerous international magazines and journals, and La Repubblica newspaper has listed him among the twenty people who will change our lives. Alessandra Viola is a scientific journalist, writer of documentaries, and a television scriptwriter. In 2011, she directed the Genoa Science Festival.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐‘Brilliant Green’ by Stefano Mancuso is a necessity to any plant lovers library. After reading this slim little volume we will never be able to look at plants the same. Mr. Mancuso begins his case by pointing out that ever since Aristotle our sciences have been anthropocentric, or at least animal-centric. It is only in the last few centuries that our presumed importance to creation has been questioned with the introduction of helio-centrism by Galileo and Copernicus. Mr. Mancuso seeks to bring this revolution to its full conclusion by challenging our assumptions about our evolutionary adaptability, replacing us with plants as the rightful rulers on the throne of life.Mr. Mancuso continues his analysis with a brief overview of history, demonstrating how we arrived at our false assumptions. In the past many philosophers relegated plants to the lowest rung on the ‘great chain of being,’ just a little higher than minerals. Their justification for this placement was the fact that plants could not move. Therefore, they denied that plants were endowed with the senses, perceptions, and sentience that animals have.After reviewing the arguments against plants being on an equal footing with animals, Mr. Mancuso seeks to dismantle each argument one by one. First he provides a fresh look at evolutionary history, showing how both plants and animals went on separate evolutionary paths, and how these separate evolutionary paths created their adaptations to their environment. As everyone knows, the path of plants was to obtain energy from the sun. Animals became dependent on plants for their food. Animals needed to be mobile in order to increase their ability to get food. Since plants depended on the sun they did not have that need.These separate adaptations of course effected the functions of cells in animal bodies versus plant bodies. This is part of the reason why animals have organs but plants don’t. Another important reason why plants don’t have organs is the fact that animals of course eat plants. Mr. Mancuso insists that the structure of plants is different from animals and we need to consider this in our understanding of plants. His revelation is that plants are in effect colonies of cells, much like an ant colony or a bee colony. Just like in an ant colony, the plant can continue living even if an important member of itself, for example a leaf, is cut off. His point is that organs would not be a strategic adaptation for plants, because if an animal came along and ate half the plant the plant would of course die. By dispersing the functions of animal organs throughout their system plants can successfully survive being fed on.After demonstrating how plant bodies are not comparable to animal bodies, Mr. Mancuso next tackles the senses. Again, he demonstrates that plants have all the senses that animals have plus more. Of course, to make his case he has to ‘deconstruct’ the senses. For example, he demonstrates that hearing is basically tuning into the vibration waves that sound makes. Of course, plants don’t have ears like animals do but their roots are attuned to the vibration of sound underneath the ground. Like water, the ground is an excellent sound conveyor, because the ground conveys sound vibrations beneath its surface. Plant roots attune to these vibrations and act correspondingly. Do plants have eyes? To Mr. Mancuso it is obvious that they do sense light, otherwise plants would not turn in the direction of the sun as it travels across the horizon. Mr. Mancuso continues with a fresh look at plant taste, touch and even senses that animals do not have. For instance, plants have a sense that detects gravity, and the electro-magnetic field.Next, the book turns to a discussion on symbiotic relationships between plants and animals, and hunter prey relationships. He illustrates that the Venus flytrap is not the only carnivore in the plant world. Many plants engage in carnivorous behavior. Insects and animals are excellent nitrogen carriers and plants growing in areas with poor nitrogen content in the soil kill insects in order to increase their nitrogen intake. Plants produce nectar in order to make bees and other insects dependent on them. When bees collect the nectar and then fly off to another flower of the same species they inadvertently pollinate this flower with the pollen of the previous plant. While the symbiotic relationship between insects and plants during pollination may be obvious to most of us, Mr. Mancuso makes the point that plants are the directors of this interaction, instead of being the passive witnesses that we assume them to be. He justifies his case by proving that bees will only fly to the same flower species of the flower that they first visited.Probably the most interesting revelations that Mr. Mancuso makes involve plant communication. An important component of plant communication is the fact that it is chemically based. If a plant is being attacked and feels threatened it actually gives off warning signals to its neighbors in the form of chemicals. It also uses chemicals as ‘help’ signals to insect allies, recruiting ants and mites to its defense when it is being fed on by unwanted insects. Besides using chemicals as an important communication tool, scientists now have made the shocking discovery that plant roots make clicking sounds to communicate with their plant brethren.Mr. Mancuso leaves his most significant critique of the taxonomic system used to differentiate plants from animals for last. Are plants sentient? Again, as he points out, we first need to de-construct intelligence. What do we mean by this construct? he raises the point that if intelligence ‘is problem solving’ plants demonstrate this ability through their adaptation to their environment. However, in plants where is intelligence to be found if there is not a brain organ? Mr. Mancuso hypothesizes that the hundreds of plant root tips working together are the locus of a ‘plant brain’.If Mr. Mancuso is right, his argument achieves nothing less than driving the final nail into the coffin of the mechanistic worldview inherited from Descartes. Picking up the pieces, science is now tasked with coming up with a new metaphor. Will it be something similar to the ‘life as information’ metaphor that Nancy Pearson proposes at the end of her book ‘the Soul of Science’? Or is it still too early to tell what paradigm science will use to guide its research in the future?Regardless of the speculative ventures a mind will wander off on while reading ‘Brilliant Green,’ anyone who wants a book that will challenge their worldview, this is it! Readers will come away from it with renewed respect for the unassuming creatures around them that they owe their lives to.

⭐I don’t mean an infiltrator planted in a nefarious plot to throw an election. I mean a green, soil-rooted, leafy plant.I’ve been reading Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola. It is at the very least a suggestive treatise.Imagine that astronauts discover life on another planet, and that the life discovered there is very different from humans. It doesn’t use our sort of language or engage in our sort of thought. Yet it senses the world with many more senses than our pathetic little five. It communicates with others of its type and other types of life on the planet. Its individuals learn quickly through experience and adjust their behavior accordingly, strategizing and planning based on experience. It lives sustainably, adapts, and thrives for periods of time that make the existence of humanity seem momentary.We might not choose to call that newly discovered life “intelligent” or “thinking.” We might puff our chests out proudly, realizing that while we have arrived from afar to study it, it will never study us, at least not in a way we can recognize. But wouldn’t much of our pride and excitement come from recognizing the impressive accomplishments and abilities of the novel life forms? Like a prophet outside his hometown, wouldn’t those alien life forms become the focus of admiring academic disciplines?Let’s come back to earth for a minute. On the earth, 99.7% of the mass of living beings is plants. All animals and insects are negligible in those terms, and also in terms of survival. If plants vanished, the rest of us would be gone in a week or two. If we vanished, plants would carry on just fine thank you. When I say “we,” you can imagine I mean “mammals” or “animals” because during the past several decades Western people have begun to return to believing that animals can feel and think and in other ways be like humans. A century ago non-human animals were thought to have no more awareness than plants or rocks.If life forms on another planet were mysterious to us because they moved very quickly or very slowly, we would laugh at the Hollywood movies that had always imagined that aliens must move at more or less our speed. Yet, we film plants’ movements, make them recognizable by speeding up the film, and go right on supposing that plants don’t move.Plants detect light above the ground and move toward it, and below the ground and move away from it. Plants detect nutrients below the ground and move toward them. Plants detect other plants closely related to themselves and leave them room, or detect unrelated competitors and crowd them out. Plants persuade insects to do their bidding. Plants hunt and dine on insects, mice, and lizards above ground, and worms below. Plants warn other plants of danger by releasing chemical messages.A plant that closes its leaves up when touched by a hand, though not by wind or rain, if rolled on a cart along a bumpy road, will at first close up with each bump, but quickly learn not to bother, while still continuing to close up if touched by a person or animal.Plants see light without having eyes. Plants hear sounds as snakes and worms do, by feeling the vibrations — there’s no need for ears. Plants that are played music between 100 and 500 Hz grow larger and produce more and better seeds. Plant roots themselves produce sounds, which conceivably may help explain coordinated movements of numerous roots. Plants sense and produce smells. Plants detect the most minute presence of countless substances in soil, putting any human gourmet chef to shame. And plants reach out and touch rocks they must grow around or fence posts they must climb.Plants have at least 15 additional senses. They detect gravity, electromagnetic fields, temperature, electric field, pressure, and humidity. They can determine the direction of water and its quantity. They can identify numerous chemicals in soil or air, even at a distance of several meters. Plants can identify insect threats and release substances to attract particular insects that will prey on the undesired ones.Plants can manipulate insects into assisting them in numerous ways. And if we weren’t humans, we could describe the relationship between certain food crops and flowers and other plants, on the one hand, and the humans who care for them on the other, in similar terms of plants manipulating people.In 2008, the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology recognized plants as possessing dignity and rights. Also in 2008, the Constitution of Ecuador recognized nature as a whole as possessing “the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.”In 2008, the United States endured what at that point amounted to a truly outrageous presidential election circus. That was then. This is now. Imagine that scientists discovered the Fox News Presidential Primary debate. Here, they might observe, are life forms that wish to destroy life, detest the females of their own species, seek out violence for its own sake, reject learned experience through the bestowing of value on ignorance and error in their own right, and generate ill will in an apparent attempt to shorten and worsen their existence. Tell me honestly, would you be more impressed and pleased to stumble upon such a thing or to walk into a garden?

⭐Good price, sent what I ordered quickly.

⭐The subject matter of Brilliant Green is utterly fascinating. Some of the adaptations and behaviours found in the plant kingdom are astonishing.The book falls down on two fronts, though:(1) The writing is bad. Sophomoric, even. It read like a mediocre high school essay. When a translated work is this badly written, I tend to blame the translator. It’s impossible to know, without fluency in both languages and a comparative reading of both texts, but I suspect that when a book wins a bunch of literary prizes in its original language and the English version is riddled with repetitive prose, unimaginative phrases, really poor structure, and so on (I’m thinking notably of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by a graduate student, not a professional writer) that the fault must be with the translation. In Brilliant Green’s case, I don’t think that can be the case. The underlying architecture is clunky and immature: a professional writer couldn’t have written this, and there is only so much polish a professional translator can apply to a — well, no need to complete that thought.(2) The other problem I had with Brilliant Green is faulty logic. Lots of circular reasoning. The authors set out to prove that plants are intelligent, then they pick the one definition of intelligence that is broad enough and ticks enough of their boxes that they know they can shoehorn plants into it. I have recently read two brilliant books, Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith and Gut by Giulia Enders, which use a conservative and broadly accepted definition of intelligence that dismisses mere evolutionary adaptations, and the case each made for cephalopod and bacterial intelligence, respectively, was far more convincing for it. Some of the exact arguments Mancuso and Viola make about distributed systems and non-anthropocentric modes of intelligence are made far more cogently by the other books. Instead, the authors choose repetition and circular reasoning as their main rhetorical tools, as if by brute force and sleight of hand they can win us to their cause. I think a strong case, based on some of the evidence presented in the book, could be made for plant intelligence, but Brilliant Green fails to make it.

⭐Cost £1.99 for the Kindle edition. Fantastic value for money!This is more like a long essay than a book – it took an hour or so to read. I found it very ‘light’ and entertaining. There is not a lot of detail, and some matters are treated repetitively, but the style is fresh and lively and at this price I certainly did not feel ‘short changed’, and I was never bored. The author comes across as a very likeable person. Reading this work felt like encountering a friendly stranger on a journey and having a fascinating conversation that is destined to be remembered for years afterwards.So, what’s it about? The essay does not assume any prior knowledge and explains everything in ‘everyday language’. It is easy to follow the author’s intentions. The author sets out to make the reader question conventional assumptions about plants, gives a brief overview of the history of (Western) ideas to show how plants have been unfairly ‘pigeon-holed’ and misrepresented in the past (which continues to bias contemporary attitudes), and sketches out some of the recent scientific evidence about the amazing abilities of plants to underline how foolish it is to continue to underestimate them. He does not set out a formal argument or seek to ‘prove’ anything. This is not an academic work. It is more like a long letter from a friendly uncle encouraging you to ‘think outside the box’. Expect this essay to raise questions in your mind, not give you cut and dried answers. After this ‘taster session’ many readers will be eager to study further to get into the details and reach their own conclusions. Some of the questions raised are philosophical, legal, cultural and others more scientific so this essay is ‘food for thought’ for people from a wide range of backgrounds and students engaged in a wide range of courses (arts, humanities, sciences).Who’s it for? The easy reading style makes it suitable for intelligent children aged about twelve and upwards, and adults of all abilities. I think its ‘blue sky thinking’ (are plants intelligent? should they have legal rights? etc) would make it an ideal gift for a teenager or others pondering which university courses to study. This would be a great ‘stocking-filler’ – a little gift which could help inspire the next generation of innovative thinkers.

⭐This book is terribly disappointing. I feel very passionate on this subject and I feel like I was sold short. There is not enough actual science, which is dealt with very briefly and in no depth at all (the mention of the fact that amoebas can solve mazes is not even referenced, let alone explained and there are plenty such throw-away mentions throughout). Most of the book is the author being angry at all those animal biologist who got all the attention is the past. I would say this is more a tirade and not a pop-science read. Such a wasted opportunity!

⭐Brilliant Green is an excellent example of cutting edge science communication. It’s concise and plainly written which makes the rather daunting topic of botany accessible and interesting. For anyone who enjoys spending lots of time outside it’s a real eye opener.The book doesn’t delve into excessive detail – which has been criticised in one of the other reviews – but I think it’s about right. It tells you enough to leave you saying ‘wow, that’s amazing’ and wanting to find out more rather than getting bogged down.Bottom line – an easy and satisfying read that can open your eyes to the fascinating world of plant life.

⭐We always knew there was more to plants than the bottom of the intelligence pyramid, but it takes a simply and elegantly argued book like this to prove that we been looking at the world the wrong way up. A wonderful slim read.

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