Monday, December 23, 2013

Plants and the Sun

There's a fascinating article in the New Yorker on The Intelligent Plant.  It looks at the current debate among plant scientists over whether plants are intelligent or might be said to behave intelligently.  Plants do seem to interact with their environment in a way that appears directed and can often be quite complex.  But what caught my eye was the statement by one scientist to the effect that one does not have to ascribe intelligence to plants just to make them sound special as it's enough simply to note that they "eat sunlight."

We all learn about photosynthesis in school.  How sunlight is converted to free electrons within plant chloroplasts and made available to make carbohydrates from air and soil.  This is indeed wonderful enough.  But the notion that what plants are doing can be simply described as eating sunlight brings to the fore just how miraculous a process this really is.  Plants eat sunlight and we animals can then eat them and those that eat them for us.  Through the intermediation of plants, we too eat sunlight.  And it's free.

On a recent warm, sunny winter solstice day, sitting outside smoking a cigar, I looked anew at how this system works.  The universe is constructed in just such a way as to allow complex physics and chemistry to evolve giant balls of gas that release tremendous fountains of energy -- we call these stars, like our sun -- free to be consumed by stationary processing plants -- that we indeed call plants -- to also feed mobile creatures that may eventually achieve individual consciousness. 

Pretty cool.