science in review

We’re on our final week discussing the English translation of Stefano Mancuso’s The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, a colorful and wide-ranging survey of recent developments in our understanding of plant biology. Mancuso is particularly interested in what sets plants apart from animals, reasoning that we can learn the most from our biggest differences. Two weeks ago we focused on the decentralized nature of plants; last week we looked at how plants have to solve problems while staying in one place. In the final chapters that we’ll look at this week, Mancuso tries to apply plant principles like these to solving human problems.
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Last week I tried to rectify the dearth of botany in my blog coverage by covering the first few chapters of Stefano Mancuso’s The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, and this week we’ll pick up where we left off. Mancuso thinks that we can learn much from plants, not least because they have such different solutions to life’s major challenges. As we discussed, one of those differences is that animals tend to have dedicated organs for various functions while plants tend to spread out functions throughout their bodies. In chapter 4, he brings up what I thought was the most intriguing difference: plants stay put. OK, maybe that’s obvious, but what’s intriguing are the implications Mancuso teases out from it.
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Despite being a biologist, I’ll admit that I’ve neglected plant biology relative to some other areas. As a student of molecular and microbiology, I suppose I’ve not paid as much attention to macroscopic organisms in general, but one picks up a certain amount of animal biology because it is similar to human biology. And the kinds of evolutionary biology conversations that come up in Christian circles often focus on animal evolution, presumably because animals are familiar and because human evolution is the most questioned. In any event, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the sci-fi novel Semiosis introduced me to some features of actual plant biology I hadn’t appreciated. So the recent English translation of Stefano Mancuso’s The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior seemed like a good opportunity to delve more into the science behind the story. And boy was I not disappointed. There’s so much interesting material here that I think it’s worth unpacking over a couple of weeks.
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