"Nonhuman intelligence has been the subject of a long-running and contentious war in science whose sides have periodically skirmished over the past 150 years," writes Sally Adee in Noēma. "It was Charles Darwin who first popularized in the West the abilities in plants that in any human we would be comfortable describing as a display of intelligence."
In her article, "A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter," Adee visits scientists who are finding sophisticated decision-making and problem-solving in organisms without brains. Plants mount strategic defenses against predators, fungi solve complex mathematical problems, and bacteria coordinate group behavior through electrical signals similar to those in human neurons.
Whether in neural networks or bacterial colonies, intelligence seems to emerge from relationships between parts working as a whole. Humans aren't separate from nature but deeply embedded within it. "Cognition is a relational property between the organism and its environment," says researcher Paco Calvo from the Minimal Intelligence Lab in Spain,. "It's not something sitting in your head."
"The reality is that all intelligence is collective intelligence," says developmental biologist Michael Levin of Tufts University. "It's just a matter of scale."
Previously:
• Why animals eat psychoactive plants
• I visited an amazing cactus nursery
• This scientist fed his own flesh to a Venus Flytrap
