Bean-In-The-World: On the Complexity of Plant Behavior

null, Vicente Raja (University of Western Ontario)

Beginning January 2021, The Rotman Institute of Philosophy will be hosting the ‘Emerging Minds’ colloquium—a series of virtual talks that will take place on selected Friday evenings. Speakers will include members of the Institute and scholars from around the world. We invite you to take part by both presenting and attending, in order to network with others who are completing novel interdisciplinary work in science and philosophy.

Abstract:

Plants move. A lot. Their world is about soil, water, and sun, but also about luring insects for pollination or avoiding being eaten by caterpillars. Being able to move helps plants in some of these activities and, like other plant behaviors (e.g., communication, habituation), that ability is way more complex than one would expect. In this presentation, I am going to talk about such a complexity of plant movement, in particular, and plant behavior, in general. To do so, first I am going to address the importance of notions like complexity or nonlinearity for the study of behavior. This will allow me to frame the study of particular plant behaviors within a larger enterprise of the behavioral and cognitive sciences. Then, I will show a study of the dynamics of plant movements of nutation. This study is performed on common beans common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) in two conditions—with and without a support to climb onto—and is based on three typical signatures of adaptively controlled processes and motions: harmonicity, predictability, and complexity. The results I will report support the hypothesis that patterns of nutation are influenced by the presence of a support to climb in their vicinity, suggesting that plant behavior could be understood as a goal-directed activity possibly involving the perception of the support to climb and the control of action towards it. In the last part of the presentation, I will evaluate several implications of this suggestion.