Like all stories, this one also starts with "Once Upon a Time." This story starts
millennia ago and it kind of starts with this guy, with a famous philosopher and
he's kind of considered the father of modern science, to some degree. The thing that
is interesting about Aristotle is that he was quite interested in the soul. Well,
he was interested about the soul because he had his own definition, and for him it
was the act of a natural body with the capacity for life. Now, the interesting
thing about him was that, compared to what we have done in more recent centuries in
again, Western culture, he wasn't dualistic about it, he wasn't like "Oh,
body AND soul" you know, any of that. Actually he was interested in the fact
that the two together make up one substance. And the other thing that he
was interested in and I guess this comes a little bit - this is the emergence of
the scientific mind in the sense of like, boxing and organising knowledge, which is
something that we have become very good at. So he decided "Let's create a few
boxes to distinguish between different souls," and the first one we call the
vegetative. And the function of the vegetative soul is just about nutrition
and reproduction. Then you have the sensitive soul, and that's with the one
that perceives and responds to the surrounding environment. And then, of
course, the important one; the rational soul, which is apparently the things,
the ones that speak and presumably think. Now, it's not difficult to see how the
three groups kind of overlap with three hierarchical groups that we can recognise
very easily. The first one would have been the plants, then you had the animals
and then the humans. He didn't just say "Okay, you go plants on one side, animals
on the other side and the human over here." No, he thought "Well okay, the plants are one group
and then the animal is, you know, it contains a particular soul which is the
the sensitive soul, but it's got the plant soul, or the vegetative soul, included within.
And then the human, by default, includes both of those previous two. Now, so then
something weird happened to this man. Like maybe, he quarrelled with with someone or
he didn't have a good night's sleep, I don't know, but some morning, he got
up and obviously with the wrong foot and he decided "You know what? We need to
separate further these groups." And so just, pretty much by randomness,
he decided "Well, what am I gonna pick to just separate these groups?" And he
decided that sensitivity or insensitivity was a good way to separate
the plants from the animals. This is where the science in him, the scientist
in him, really fails! Because it's like - what was the criteria for that? "No
criteria, just because I can, because I'm Aristotle, and everyone that is gonna
listen to me, is gonna believe me," and that's exactly what happened, everyone
that came after him, for millennia, just gave automatically... it was assumed that
he was right. And the influence of this one man and his his ideas is still here,
now, despite many more philosophising minds throughout history. Which is quite
cool. If I was Aristotle, I would be very
proud of myself! Now, what, in effect, happened with this is that, whether he
meant it or not, but by calling the plants insensitive, well, you're kind of
objectifying them, you're saying that they have a soul, but that soul doesn't
actually act as life. So you can see how easy it is to then become a nothing, of no
importance, something that can be replaced, something that can be thrown
away easily. Plants, they have a whole suite of different ways of conversing
about and showing themselves. They have plenty of stories about light, about
darkness. They are good at checking out the ratio between red:infrared for example,
which is light that is bouncing on and off from neighbours, and based on that
they can tell whether "hmm, the guy next to me is going to
be fast, and I'd better check, I'd better keep an eye, because I might get
overshadowed and then I'm gonna die, so I have to modify my growth rate so that I
can compensate for that." So there is a constant monitoring, in that sense, for
example. More recently, with peas, we have seen our sound actually play a role not
only in reproduction, so with the pollinators, not only in defence, but also
in the way in which plants can find resources. And of course, one of the
resources the plants are after is water. Plants can detect the source of water, at
a distance, without water being even there, but just the sound of. And so if
you can hear it, it will give you a vague idea of the direction. Then, as you get
closer, you will hit that humidity gradient and it's like "Yes! Bingo! I got it!" and then you
can maybe fine-tune your growth to the actual source. These are just beautiful,
very recent examples of what raw sound could play, can play, in the life of
plants. So basically, all of this communication and sharing of information
from different senses is ultimately facilitating, you know, if you are a plant,
your ability to thrive. And the best way to thrive in any system that's there, is to
learn from your past experience. To remember what happened before so that
you don't have to remember every single time and you can be much better at responding
when the thing happens again and again. And this is exactly what we are finding,
the plants are really good at learning. So I guess,
yeah, this was a very long, millennia-long "gossip," but unfortunately it wasn't very
scientific, was it? He had no reason, no proof, and yet we have believed this
story for a very long time, so much so that we have almost, and I say almost,
driven the entire planet to the brink of complete destruction. I'd like to finish
with this quote, because I think he summarises a lot of my "blah-blah" for the
last whatever time! Thank you so much.