Factually! with Adam Conover - Your Houseplants Can Think with Zoë Schlanger

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Our understanding of intelligence is always growing, but recent research has thrown a fascinating curveball: we're discovering that plants are intelligent too. Though they might not look like creatures we typically describe as intelligent, plants can store information, solve problems, and develop complex social networks. This week, Adam sits with Zoë Shlanger, author of The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, to explore this galaxy-brain concept of plant intelligence and what it means for how we see all life and our place in the world. Find Zoë's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. We have got a hell of a galaxy brain episode for you today. You know, in the last couple of months, we've done topics about the existence or non-existence of free will and other big philosophical topics. Well this week, we have an episode that is going to make you change how you think about the nature of intelligence itself.

For real. But you know what? Before we get into it, let's back up for a minute. Just what is intelligence at all? In our daily lives, when we're not thinking too hard, we have heuristics that we use to help us decide whether or not another being is intelligent. And it's usually based on how similar that being seems to us. The more like us it is, the easier it is for us to understand it as intelligent. So for instance, I've concluded that my dog is at least somewhat intelligent because in addition to being in communication with me about walking, going to the bathroom, or

food, I can also see her dream. And I dream, so that makes me go, okay, she's similarly intelligent to me in at least some ways. A crow shows that it's intelligent by using tools and solving problems just like a human does, and an octopus shows it's intelligent by changing colors when it's frightened and by generally acting like a weirdo little sea freak, just like me when I'm in the ocean. When we recognize that another being feels, thinks thinks and experiences sort of like we do it Changes how we think about that creature That's part of why some people feel okay eating plants

But not animals because plants seem a lot less like us than animals do they seem less intelligent Well today we've got some very complicated news for the vegetarians, because recent discoveries show us that plants actually behave in ways that exhibit intelligence or kinds of intelligence much like ours. There are now studies showing that plants can store and save information, that they have complex social networks, and that they flexibly solve problems. And these findings are transforming how we think about plants and about intelligence itself. And we have an incredible episode for you today all about that topic. But before we get into it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon.

Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free and gets you access to all of our awesome community features. And I want to remind you that if you love stand-up comedy, come see me on the road. Head to AdamConover.net for tickets and tour dates. Coming up soon, I'm heading to Phoenix, Arizona, Toronto, Canada, a lot of other great places as well. Head to AdamConover.net for all those tour dates.

So just how similar to human or animal intelligence is plant intelligence? Is it even fair to consider them as the same thing? And how do plants have intelligence when they don't even have brains? Well, to answer those questions and more, our guest today is Zoe Schlanger. She's a reporter at the Atlantic and the author of the fantastic new book, The Light Eaters, How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a new understanding of life on Earth. The research that she is going to present to us today is absolutely cutting edge.

You are hearing this stuff before almost anybody else. So I hope you love this interview. Let's take it away with Zoe Schlanger. Zoe, thank you so much for being on the show. It's awesome to be here. Let's jump into it. In what way are plants intelligent as you write about in your new book?

They can do just about anything you could imagine to make their lives profitable in really harsh conditions. I mean, you think about plants, they grow rooted in place, and they've figured out all these ingenious evolutionary methods to adapt to that. I mean, they can make decisions, they can recognize their kin, they can communicate, often sometimes communicate better with their family members as opposed to strangers. I mean, they're making choices in sexual mates constantly. They're conscripting insects into their service.

I mean, it's just a remarkable amount of very active functions that they have that we don't normally think about. Well, I'm sure we're gonna get into to what degree we should describe this as intelligence and how it compares to our own, but I'd love to just start with some examples. Some of those were so enticing. What are some of your favorite from the book?

I love thinking about how plants conscript animals to do their bidding because this is completely inverts the way we think about the kind of hierarchy of action with different organisms. So scientists have known this for about, I'd say, 25 years now that tomato plants and corn plants, and I think cotton plants too, they're able to sample the regurgitant from caterpillars that are eating them. So the saliva that's left behind from the caterpillars, and identify the species of caterpillar, or at least what species of wasp they need to entice to them, so that the wasp will come and then inject their larva,

their eggs into the caterpillars, and the eggs will hatch, and the baby wasps will eat the caterpillar from the inside out. And this is this elaborate way that the plant has of attempting to save itself by exuding this perfect chemical cocktail that entices exactly the wasp

that needs to come pluck off the caterpillars. Very metal. So that is super fascinating and metal and awesome, but it's also the kind of interaction I expect to come from evolution, right? That there are many, many processes in nature that seem so specific, who, you know, they must be evidence of intelligence.

But what I learned in college from, you know, Darwin was that these are actually the result of the dumb or natural process of natural selection, which has no designer or intelligence behind it, but, you know, through whatever generations, generations produces an interaction that seems intelligent. So what is the difference between what you are describing and that, or what causes you to label these

as intelligence more specifically? Well, I'm so glad you brought up Darwin and this idea of natural selection and these all just being sort of evolutionary adaptations, like of course the tomatoes evolved with the wasps and the caterpillars, of course they've all figured with the wasps and the caterpillars. Of course, they've all figured out these evolutionary tricks to deal with each other.

And that's totally true. And it also brings up the big existential question of our lives, which is that there's very few things that we do that doesn't fall under that category as well. I mean, almost anything is an evolutionary adaptation. Some of the ways we make mark the hallmark of intelligence is how plastic these things are and how susceptible your reactions are to changing

when conditions change. If you can adjust how you approach something in real time to take into account your recent past, your far past, the changing, fluctuating conditions in the environment, that's when intelligence starts to take into account your recent past, your far past, the changing, fluctuating conditions in the environment. That's when intelligence starts to come into play, because it's suggesting this kind of multivariable, very alive, alert reaction to the environment.

But really, the background of all this is that it's hard to tell the difference between rote reflex and intelligent behavior, because intelligence we don't really even have a definition for. We come up with definitions for ourselves. Among humans, there's always very academic definitions. But when we're talking about intelligence

in non-human species, it gets very mushy. And it's also really important to remember that we thought animals didn't have any form of intelligence until very recently. I mean, I think about in the late 1800s or up until the late 1800s, they used to do live dissections on dogs because they thought dogs couldn't experience pain

because only humans were the provenance of sensation and that all other animals just, if they yelped or something that was sort of rote reflex again, not this innate capacity to experience sensation. So our thinking on this scientifically changes decade to decade and sometimes drastically. And so when we're trying to pinpoint consciousness or intelligence in another species, it's all very mushy territory. It's hard to distinguish exactly what we're talking about. It's more what we socially or intelligence in another species, it's all very mushy territory. It's hard to distinguish exactly what we're talking about.

It's more what we socially decide to consider intelligence. Yeah, wow, what a great answer. I mean, the issue of definition of words like this devils us so much on this show. A couple months ago, we had two different neuroscientists on talking about free will and whether free will exists. And it almost immediately becomes a question of definition. And really between the two experts who we had on,

both of whom were wonderful speakers and very smart people, it seemed that the difference between them was almost solely a matter of definition, not a matter of the science. Although not both of them agreed with that. That was what I came away with. Fascinating. Yeah, it was really fascinating.

So I think, yeah, the same question comes up almost immediately here. What do we call intelligence? What do we mean by it? Like I literally started thinking, okay, well, you're adapting to your environment, sure. But does that, do you need the ability to adapt to something you've never seen before

in a way that no species like you has ever done before? And then I'm like, wait, am I talking about free will? Is that what I'm about to ask you? Is free will matter? So let's just talk about the definition for a little while longer. I think the idea of agency came up in your writing. Am I right about that? Absolutely, yeah. So tell me how the idea of agency came up in your writing. Am I right about that? Absolutely, yeah.

So tell me how the idea of agency connects with intelligence. I like the concept of agency more, just in terms of if we're talking about syntax and language. We don't have a definition for consciousness even on ourselves. Intelligence is laden with all of these human terms. I do think there's a way to morph these words into the recognition of us handling something so completely other that like plant intelligence would be very different from our intelligence,

but yet both intelligences. But agency can take a step back from all of that and think about an agentive subject and what that means. Like if something has agency, it has some capacity to have control over the direction of its life. And it is making good decisions for its future. It is forming its environment and its body to best suit its needs in a changing environment. And plants certainly have that. And it brings

into this, the conversation plants as active subjects rather than these kind of passive ornaments, which for most of our, you know, Western cultural history, we've seen them as probably since like Aristotle and rationalism. We've thought about plants as kind of ornamental things that are kind of between rocks and maybe like slugs or something. But what we know now is that of course, and of course plant scientists have known this for a long time, plants are highly active decisioning environment mediating creatures in their own right.

And I think agency really gets at that. Should I not be thinking of, I mean, I do have plants as ornaments that I think of as being pretty close to rocks, rocks I have to water. Is that a mistake for me? Yeah, so sorry to say. Oh no.

I mean, I have a house, I'm in Brooklyn. I don't have a garden sadly, but I have a room full of house plants and they are certainly ornaments of my world and since they make my home more beautiful. But since doing this research and in the last few years, I cannot look at them anymore as simply passive. They are very much like having full-blown creatures

in my home, albeit kind of like a little bit weakling creatures. I mean, you think about houseplants. I have to evaporate the chlorine off of the tap water before I give it to them. These are somewhat diminished versions of their wild kin, but nonetheless likely sensing a lot more than I think. Does that make you treat them any differently?

Do you have a different relationship with them now that you know this about them? I have to tell you like 18 months into researching this book, I had this very eerie moment on my couch where I was just sitting there kind of late at night, shadows on the walls of my house plants. I'm thinking like, am I like keeping these plants like creatures and cages, like animals and cages in a way? Because I had just been researching this chapter on plant communication and come to understand how much communication is happening below ground and above ground. And there's all of these quite social interactions between plants.

And I was looking at my house plants in discreet pots and going, oh my goodness, are these caged creatures. But I got over that pretty quickly. In the same way that, you know, you imagine, oh, I only have one dog and a dog, you know, in the wild, if there is such a thing for a domesticated dog that's been living around humans for millennia. But in the wild, if there is such a thing for a domesticated dog that's been living around humans

for a millennia, but in the wild, they'd be in a pack and they'd be communicating with each other. And is my dog's life somehow stunted or diminished because it's being kept in an apartment rather than where it should be? You have the same sort of sense about your plants. Oh, would they rather be in the forest talking with the other plants?

Right, almost. I tried to hold back a little bit from the maximum version of anthropomorphizing there, but true. And yet then, you know, going to your point about dogs, we've domesticated a lot of creatures and they now rely wholly on us and we on them in some certain social senses.

But really the plants in my house, they are all tropical varieties that have been grown in nurseries for generations and probably would not handle the mean streets very well. So I feel okay about it now. Well, and there's the argument that I read in Michael Pollan's book, Botany of Desire, like 20 years ago, which I mean, this is your field.

So maybe this is a very boring old hat observation to you, but the way that he flips looking at plants as rather than things that we have domesticated and we have taken advantage of, there's a way to look at them as they are taking advantage of us. They are using our need for ornament or for food or for, you know, in the case of marijuana getting high

or whatever to propagate themselves super, super widely. And I do think of dogs that way too, where dogs are like, we didn't say, look, oh, we want to domesticate dogs. They were just hanging around eating human trash. They were just feeding off of our trash of cities. This is my understanding of the domestication of dogs. And eventually made their way into the home, you know?

But it was sort of their idea was to eat our delicious trash, right? A hundred percent. There's actually such a fascinating scientific concepts to back up what you're talking about. I mean, this Michael Pollan introduced a lot of people to this idea that plants may have domesticated us, not the other way around.

And of course you look at like corn is the most widely propagated plant ever, I'm pretty sure. And like, you know, under our care, they get everything they need and it's a very sweet situation, but I like to think about all of these plants that formed themselves into crops. There's a concept called Vavilovian mimicry and Vavilov was a Soviet agronomist

who realized that rye plants had evolved from, or speciated from being weeds in wheat fields. And they were completely inedible. And then through the process of selection of being hand pulled out by farmers who are weeding the rye weed out of the wheat fields, slowly rye came to take on characteristics more similar to the wheat.

They began to mimic the wheat until they became an edible species. And that's also how we got oats. And Vavilavian mimicry is occurring now too. I mean, there's a wheat called vetch that's commonly in lentil fields and it has a seed. And over time, the vetch seed changed its shape to be this kind of like UFO shaped disc,

just like a lentil to avoid being threshed out, we did winnowed out by threshing machines. So it was trying to then trick a machine, not the hand of a farmer. And then now we have, like you think about herbicide resistant weeds in farm fields. There's at least one geneticist who feels that those weeds are committing Vavilovian mimicry on this biochemical level, that it's they're adopting traits from the plants

that have been engineered to be able to survive being sprayed with this herbicide and taking them for themselves and becoming resistant to this herbicide and taking them for themselves and becoming resistant to the herbicide themselves. So it really flips this notion of power on its head for sure. I mean, that's really fascinating that, you know, there's a weed field, there's farmers pulling out anything that looks like a weed.

So I'm guessing, well, they pull out the things that most look like weeds, the rye plants that look a little bit less like weeds, a little bit more like wheat, are less likely to be pulled out. So then the entire population becomes more wheat-like and thus more edible. Precisely.

And I guess the question is, who did that? Did the farmer do it or did the rye do it? Or was it a, you know, it was also a dumb process of natural selection. But yeah, who took advantage of who in this situation? Did the plant sneakily become like the wheat? Hehehe, I'll make myself edible so that I can survive and take advantage of these humans.

Or did we, did we like unknowingly create, you know, a new food stuff for ourselves? I think it's impossible to tease apart intention here. Nobody, I mean, there may have been no active intention whatsoever, but we are so entangled in the creating of everything else. There's a whole field of evolutionary theory that suggests kind of these interplays

are actually what drive evolution rather than like extreme competition or something else. But of course, yeah, we're talking about natural selection. We created the conditions for selection. And if I've learned anything, it's that biology, the kind of arc of biology is like tilted towards more life. Like everything's going to do something to live longer and better and reproduce better.

And if there's a way to do that, biology and evolution will find it. And then you end up with edible rye. Oh man, I am like geeking out really hard because this is when I first started reading, Darwin and Richard Dawkins and people like that when I was in college and thinking about the evolutionary process and what life is,

it's when I get most like galaxy brain and I just sort of, you know, like spacing out thinking about what a remarkable thing life is, that it just naturally finds these holes in which to propagate itself and creating difference and speciation. But it's really interesting that you said,

yeah, it's hard for us to tease apart the intent. I think a lot of evolutionary scientists would say, well, hold on, that's anthropomorphization. There is no intent. It's at the best a sort of poetic way to describe what's happening, but nobody intends anything because intent is only something that humans can have or that thinking systems can have.

But you seem very comfortable using the term intent there. Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out. So to back up a little bit, I'm doing a lot of air quote using in my mind, but I should use it, we're on camera, so I should just do the air quotes. But intent here, you know, I'm doing a lot of air quote using in my mind, but I should use it, we're on camera, so I should just do the air quotes. But intent here, you know, I'm not advocating

for like a creationist point of view where there's like some force actively shaping with intention the process of evolution. It's an incredible act of random mutation that produces all of these incredible adaptations. And then when you're, so then coming down from the evolutionary level, thinking about individual organisms doing what they do.

We're very comfortable talking about intent with ourselves because we know what it means. We're very uncomfortable talking about intent when it comes to something like a plant because there's no brain there, which provokes its own series of problems for thinking about intelligence. But it's also hard to say whether or not there is some form of intent. If we're talking about the intent, the will to survive, that there's some ingrained desire

to continue living in any living organism. Like how else does one describe the things it does to continue surviving? It's tricky. I mean, we have to be able to stand outside ourselves for a minute and acknowledge that I'm, you know, no one's talking about plants being like little humanoid creatures.

They're not little cartoon characters or little demigods or anything like that. They're aliens, intent, completely alien to us. They are not little cartoon characters or little demigods or anything like that. They're aliens, intent, completely alien to us. They diverged from our branch of life so long ago. And yet they have things going on that are very active. And we don't have the words to distinguish that with nuance. And so when I use intent, I'm using it as a bridge to our own understanding of what

an organism is doing with its time on Earth. Yeah. But we have to also hold that it's not a human activity in the way we normally think of that. Yeah, but it's sort of impossible for us to describe without reference to human activity. And when we're asking the question, are plants intelligent or are animals intelligent

or is any other being conscious? Which I would argue are important questions to us to answer for all sorts of reasons. It connects to our sense of morality, our understanding of ourselves. Well, we are asking something about, is it like us in some way? And we're often, I think, caution not to anthropomorphize

because it's like sort of an easy hack And we're often, I think, caution not to anthropomorphize because it's sort of an easy hack, right, for understanding something else. But also, what else are we supposed to do? We're people, I don't know. Like, I think all the time about my dog, one of the reasons I know my dog is conscious or I think she's intelligent is like she has dreams, I have dreams.

I know she has dreams because she twitches in the middle of the night and she like is barking at things. She's acting, you know, she has, things are happening to her in her mind, I can tell. And this is a big one for me. We have a two, we live in a two story home and our garage is underneath. And so when someone drives out, you can see them drive away.

When my girlfriend leaves the front door and gets in the car and goes, our dog watches her leave through the front door, then runs upstairs and looks out the window so she can watch the car leave the house, right? And like, this is pretty complex. I'm like, this is intelligence, right? She has, she is like tracking my girlfriend

as she leaves the front door and goes downstairs. She knows where she is. She knows what the car is. She knows that she's inside of the car. And she's like, if I go upstairs, I can see the same person from a different angle. You know what I mean? That's like, that's a pretty high level of intelligence.

And maybe something that we wouldn't have thought that a dog had in the 19th century, if we were at a sort of benighted idea of that. The only way for me to understand it as intelligence is to compare it to my own experience, because I do that too, because I also miss my girlfriend. I'm like, oh, goodbye, you know, I'm watching her leave.

So is it like a mistake to refer to our own, you know, our own intelligence when we're trying to understand the capabilities that plants or other creatures have. I would say it's not a mistake entirely. I mean, we're just really bad as a species of imagining what it's like to be something else and we may never fully be able to, you know, there's a great Nagel essay,

What is it Like to be a Bat? Yes. We will probably never be able to step into the subjectivity of another creature wholly enough to understand what it's like to be a bat. We will probably never be able to step into the subjectivity of another creature wholly enough to understand what it's like to be that creature. But we have to work with the kind of brains and capacity to think that we have. And there's been people who've argued

that anthropomorphism is actually useful in the sense that it's a metaphor. If you can understand every time you're using these kind of human-centric words to describe non-human creatures, these are metaphoric bridges. And I also think about, I mean, Theophrastus, if we want to go back to the classics,

he was considered the first true botanist. He wrote the first book about plants. That was about the plants themselves instead of about how humans use them for medicine or whatever. And he coined the term heartwood to describe the inner core of trees, which we still use today.

And he supported that use of heartwood by saying that it's by the better known that we can understand the lesser known. And no one's gonna look for a vena cava or valves inside of a tree. There's no true heart there. But it gets to something about the tree, that this is the tender inner core

that if damaged will severely impair the ability of the tree to live. There's something like a heart there. And so it's a sticky mushy thing, but I do think metaphors are how we understand the world and to some extent if we can use them responsibly and try and hold the complexity of otherness while we're talking about them,

I think it's okay to build those bridges. And then also just like even thinking about your experience with your dog, when we're talking about consciousness, I think it's like fascinating that two months ago, I think, or maybe just last month at NYU, there was a declaration on consciousness issued and this group of international biologists

and philosophers got together. And they put out a declaration that said that, okay, we're now extending the possibility for consciousness to insects, cephalopods, oh, I'm sorry, insects, crustaceans, and fish. Wow. And this was this update of another declaration from the Cambridge Declaration in 2012

where they extended the possibility for consciousness to mammals and birds. So we just keep widening this little circle in the sand. And we're already at this point where the question of, do you need a brain to do any of this stuff is coming into sharp relief or whatever other cliche you'd like to use. Because some of the creatures they

decided in this newest declaration don't have a cerebral cortex, which is something we thought we absolutely needed for consciousness. So how much wider is that circle gonna get and like what's next, what's beyond insects and is it, could it be plants? Wow, that is fascinating.

I wanna talk later on about what it would mean for us in our relationships with those species to extend the idea of consciousness and intelligence to them. But first, I feel like we've gone a little bit deep in the episode without getting more plant facts. I want more cool plant facts. Sure.

So you talked about plants communicating with each other. What are some of the most striking examples you found of plant communication? Well, researchers have known now for several decades that plants can produce chemicals in their bodies. They're incredibly good at chemical synthesis that are complex and specific to match certain tasks, including chemicals that they release through their pores

that end up warning other plants in the area of there being like an insect attack or something like this. And these alarm calls can be incredibly specific. In the last five to 10 years, researchers are understanding that plants can selectively release alarm calls that only warn close kin of the attack, or when the situation's extremely dire and they're under heavy attack from, let's say, insects, the alarm calls will become more broad, more general. And it's kind of the equivalent of like,

if you're in like a theater and someone yells fire, but it's in German, you still know something is up. It may not be your dialect, but it is enough to warn the more general area. And this is something we know about from animal behavior. Song burns have sort of back channels to warn only their close kin of an attack, but in certain circumstances where it calls for it

to warn everyone in the area. There's also all this work now, or there's some work, I qualify this because we're talking about absolute cutting edge of plant science, so there's some work. I love it, cutting edge plant science on this show, you heard it here first. Absolutely. So there's some work. I love it. Cutting edge plant science. I'm gonna show you. Heard it here first.

Absolutely. There are people who are looking at regionally specific dialects in plants in the sense that when plants grow in and spend several generations in an isolated area, let's say like a little field or a valley, their chemical signals will be slight variations, regionally specific variations

of the more general dialect, quote unquote, of the species. And we're talking about communication, but entirely through chemical compounds. And every time our capacity to sense gases becomes more refined, we find out that the compounds plants produce are that much more refined, that much more complex and subtle as well.

So this is like, you're almost talking about language that they have. When you use the word dialect, you're specifically referencing language that plants in different areas have different waves of speaking to each other, like a different regional chemical accent? Is that basically?

100%. I feel comfortable using the word dialect because it's in the peer reviewed paper where they're talking about this. And I was also speaking to researchers who study the ways that air pollution, like exhaust fumes from cars, muddle these kind of chemical sentences,

and they use the words chemical sentences. So I'm, I feel my hands are clean when I'm using those words in this case. Wow, that is so fucking cool. Thank you to Claritin for supporting this episode and providing us with samples. You know, my ability to conduct interviews on this show pretty much relies on me being able to have smooth conversations with my guests. for supporting this episode and providing us with samples. You know, my ability to conduct interviews on this show

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Ask for Claritin D at your local pharmacy counter. You don't even need a prescription. Go to claritin.com right now for a discount so you can live Claritin Clear, use as directed. When you say that they would only warn their close kin, how does that work? Is it that it's a chemical that's only can be received by the close kin?

And do you mean literally cousins, nephews? Because I know that in humans, again, this is something that at least I remember reading, Richard Dawkins writing about when I was back in college, that humans have different reactions to other humans that we share a certain amount of genetic material with. And I feel this, me and my girlfriend both have nieces and we love each other's nieces,

but not as much as we love our own nieces. I see my own niece and I'm like, oh shit, I love that baby so much. And I wanna donate to her college fund and whatnot. And the other baby, I'm like, that's a cute baby. And I like hanging out with her, but you know what I mean? Like I've experienced this myself now that we have a chemical reaction

or a biological reaction to sharing a certain proportion of our genes with another being. And so plants are the same way? Yes, and there's a lot of animal behavior and I guess probably human behavior. You're talking about grouping yourself in this. Theory for this in the animal world. I can't remember someone listening to the show

is gonna be screaming in their head about what this is actually called. Can't remember the guy's name. But famously this guy, I think he was British, came up with this concept that it's like something is worth two of your brothers or eight of your cousins. There's this hierarchy of worth.

And this makes sense for genetic group fitness, kind of keeping the genetic fitness of your group. It's like your brothers are much more closely related to you. It's more of your genetic lineage. Your cousins, they're worth something, but maybe a little bit less. Yeah. And there's evidence now that plants can highly distinguish

between levels of relatedness. And we are talking about siblings, cousins, in the sense of like sharing how much parentage is shared and respond to them differently. And this is really, really cutting. I mean, kin recognition in plants first came up in 2007. So in science years, this is like yesterday, but there's all this research on rice

and different cross breeds of rice and they will compete less with the most closely related rice and compete a little less but still compete a little with rice that has like one quarter of different genes and then like there's a gradient of relatedness and you get farther and farther away and competition increases. There's also research finding that plants can figure out whether or not they're planted next to their kin based on the gradient of light passing through the leaves of the plant shading them.

What? And then rearrange their leaves. This is one study on a phalocress, which is like the lab rat of the plant world. But the thalecress will rearrange its leaves over two days to avoid shading its siblings once it's determined its next to a sibling plant. No way.

Yes, and it's not always so clear cut. There has been instances of kin recognition research where they find the opposite, or no effect. But in almost every plant they've tested, there's been some recognition of kin. So you're telling me that a plant will recognize, hold on a second, I'm shading my brother or sister or nephew or niece, and then just like, I'm just gonna move my branches a little bit

to make sure they get a little more light on their leaves. Like I can move my leaf over here, and then you got some more on you, but they'd only do that for a closely related plant. Yes, that's totally what I'm saying. And what's more, this part's really mind blowing. That's fucked up. I know.

So you think of a plant, like a fully grown plant with leaves doing this, and that's one level of fucked up. There's a paper that looked at the fact that a seed can sense what it's planted beside, even in the seedling, in the seed stage, it hasn't even poked up anything yet. And if it's planted in the soil nearby a foreign seed, like a completely different species, it won't really do anything differently.

like a completely different species, it won't really do anything differently. But if it's planted nearby a foreign seed and a sibling or like the exact same species seed, it will time its germination so that the two related seeds come up at the same time to give it a better shot at shading out that third foreigner seed. Wow.

So everything a plant needs for kin recognition, at least in this case of this paper that I'm talking about, exists in the seed stage. So what does that mean for, you don't even need a whole body to do this. It's just remarkable. I mean, this is incredible. I feel like what we're getting through here

is like a lot of different categories of what we would consider intelligence. We think intelligence is communication, being a social organism, having kin relations. These are all things that you've convinced me plants have. Let's talk about some other ideas. Do plants have memories? Yeah, do plants remember things?

You betcha. Oh my God. Sorry, your houseplant has some idea of your ill treatment of it. No, I don't know about that. But memory is pretty fundamental to being a plant. I mean, there's layers to this conversation. One is the more, the form of memory we all might immediately imagine plants have, which is that plants can record the passage of time and the variation of temperature.

So a lot of our fruit trees, like peach trees, almond trees, bulb plants like tulips, they require something that is called the memory of winter in order to bloom in the spring. So it's not enough that the warm weather eventually comes. They have to have recorded a certain number of cold days that have to be a requisite amount of cold before the spring to ever bloom,

which you can imagine how climate change starts to fuck with things like peach crops. Right. So that's- Oh, not just because it got too warm, but like there wasn't enough cold Exactly. to trigger the plant getting, it's like,

well, I'm not horny yet. Like I just don't feel that way. Like, got it. Yeah, exactly. So that's the more grandiose, like seasonal memory, which I find really touching. I mean, we've experienced circadian rhythms and soda plants. Yeah.

But recently researchers have found more plastic, sort of spontaneous memories in plants. I went to Germany to a greenhouse to see a plant that actually normally grows in the Andes in Peru. And it grows really high up. It's this incredible flower. It looks like a little alien laser shooter space implement. It has these concave canoe shaped petals,

and then it has stamen that are laying down in each of its petals topped with this yellow pollen. And it's one of these rare plants that you can see move in real time. So a bee comes along, sticks its probe into a little scallop in the middle of the flower, and that triggers something to cause one of these stamen to go from laying down

to fully erect, which is, you know, this is the male part of the flower that we're talking about. And researchers knew this part of it. What they didn't realize was that the plant seems to now be able to record the time interval between pollinator visits and time the when it will raise its stamen to when it expects a pollinator to show up. And it'll change its raising of the stamen, that time interval, when that time interval does in fact change. And this makes sense for a plant that's growing someplace really high altitude. It's not a lot of pollinators around. You need to make every shot count. So it will parcel out its pollen. If there's fewer pollinators, it'll

give more pollen to each one that comes by and only raise its stamen when it expects a pollinator to be there. So this is kind of a short-term memory and this very plastic memory, this very spontaneously adjusting to different changing memories that this flower has. And so the researchers called it a memory flower, which is quite poetic.

That's incredible. I mean, memory makes me think of one of the qualities we ascribe to intelligence is like a certain amount of plasticity that, you know, you say that so much of what we do as humans is defined by evolution and defined by genetics. Yes, but what I think really distinguishes humans is that we have a huge amount of behaviors which are not evolutionarily designed,

but they are cultural, right? Or they are learned that we have a lot of capacity given to us by genetics. We have this great big brain, but then there's a new level of hierarchy on top of evolution that we have in our behavior that we call culture, intelligence, learning, all these sorts of things, right?

And that's why, you know, if you look at humanity, our behavior has changed as a species beyond our genetics, right? That in just a couple thousand years, we went from pre-biblical times, right? To skyscrapers and cars and new forms of music and new ways of interacting with each other. And none of that can be genetic

because genetics isn't fast enough for that, right? Or at least not all of it can be genetic. There must be this other level of complexity and change and plasticity. And so are there any examples of plants exhibiting that kind of thing where it's like, okay, something about their behavior is changing in response to stimuli that happens non-genetically?

Are they teaching each other things, et cetera? Yes, so of course, we're talking about human culture and all these amazing things we've done in the last 500, 1000, 2000 years. I just didn't realm where you'd get to really experience that connection with the vast, vast arc of human culture changing. So yeah, I still wanna say that human culture,

highly complex plant culture, different level, different thing altogether. But we do know that plants, what plants do, how they express their potential is not all purely genetically pre-described, kind of in the sense you're talking about. So I went to this lab in Wesleyan, this is the lab of Sonia Sultan,

and she studies how plants pass on skills intergenerationally, that there's this kind of intergenerational memory happening where if certain plants are grown in conditions that are challenging, let's say they don't have enough water, they may change their body plan to respond to that. They may grow these like slithery, very thin roots that can go much farther with less energy to find water in farther places. But it will take the plant a lot of energy

to make that adaptation and it will take a while for their body plan to change. But those plants, when they have babies, the babies will be just immediately ready to handle that situation. They will be better at seeking out that water. They will already have these like tenderly roots. And that's just one example of a challenge that their body would respond to.

Um, and then you think about that happening every generation over time. And plant generations can be incredibly short. And then you end up with plants that are fantastic at growing wherever they end up. Um, and often these are invasive plants, plants that show up somewhere and change through several generations, adapt to their situation ferociously well, reproduce extremely well, and then each new generation has all of this received knowledge from previous generations on how to be a better plant in this area.

And then you have insanely invasive plants, just really good at being plants. So this is kind of this inter, what do we call this? Epigenetics. This is this kind of epigenetic transfer of information. And in a way, this is genetic. I mean, most things are ultimately genetic, but it's the expression of a potential of your genome that wasn't expressed before.

And that's the case with us too. I mean, there's, we have a huge range of things, um, ways that our bodies can be plastic or, uh, change according to environmental circumstances. So even things you don't think of as genetic, like changing one generation is sort of a form of genetics is just,'s just environmentally mediated, I suppose. Yes, and I'm not meaning to say that all forms of intelligence must be like non-genetic in origin, but it does seem like that's something

that we're talking about when we talk about intelligence is what is that extra layer of complexity that is layered on top of genetics that allows for faster change and more complex behavior that doesn't rely on natural selection directly. And it sounds like you're saying that in this case, there's a latent plasticity in the plants that comes into effect when triggered by the right stimuli,

when the plant notices that the stimuli is happening, that is too fast to simply be a natural selection based change. It's something on top of that. Yes, and actually, I have another wild, completely unresolved example of this, if you feel like having another fun plant. So there's this debate right now raging,

this very spicy debate in this one corner of the botany world about Boquilla trifolialata, which is this vine that grows in the southern cool rainforests of Chile. And this vine has always been there. It's everywhere. I went down there to see it.

It's absolutely everywhere in this forest. It looks so normal. It looks kind of like a bean plant. It's got three little leaf clusters. And just in 2014, a researcher was walking along a path and noticed that this plant sort of disappeared into a bush. It's a climbing vine, so it climbs things, that's fine, but he couldn't find the leaves of it in the bush.

He looked closer and he realized that this plant, this bokehla vine, had morphed its leaves once it was in this bush to exactly mimic the leaf texture, shape, size, color, vein pattern of the leaves of this bush. And so that was 2014. He's now been doing some more work on this. He's found-

Like Homer Simpson disappearing back into the bush. 100%. That's exactly disappeared into this foam wall. He has found like 22 instances now of Boquilla spontaneously changing its body plan to perfectly mimic whatever it's growing beside. And at first he was like, this might be these long evolutionary relationships,

exactly what you're talking about. Like maybe this plant's been growing with these other species for millennia in this particular forest. But bokehla will even try to mimic a plant that was just introduced to the forest 10 years ago, or about 10, 15 years ago. And I went down and saw this myself. It's amazing.

It's like even watching it try to, it doesn't always do it really well. So it's like if a Bocula vine is, it has these kind of roundish leaves and has to work quite hard to change them dramatically. So if it's growing next to this like lacy frilly plant that has a thousand little perforations, it'll make this sort of weird lopsided,

like shitty mimic of that plant. But you can see it trying. And so this is an example of something that cannot possibly be evolutionary exactly, or it can't possibly be genetic, fully pre-programmed. This is spontaneous mimicry, which we think of in things like, it's being called the chameleon vine, because that's the closest thing one can think of.

This is unheard of for a plant to just spontaneously mimic whatever it's growing beside. And they don't know how it does it. I mean, that is such a clear cut example of something that I must call intelligence because it's a matter of noticing what you as a plant are nearby in the world and trying to act accordingly. That's a capacity that can be given to you by evolution, that could be an evolutionary adaptation,

but the specifics of it are layered on top of that. And that is at least as good a definition of intelligence as any other, is like a behavioral capacity that you got from evolution, but the specifics are determined by the time and the place in your own capacity and noticing what's happening around you and coming up with a novel solution. Exactly, yes.

So just to even kind of galaxy bring this slightly more. Yeah. This spicy little fight happening is between a camp of botanists who believe this means plants have some capacity for vision because how else are they processing what is fundamentally visual information, what another leaf looks like. But the botanist who actually made the discovery

and who I spent some time with in Chile thinks something much weirder, more sci-fi, even than that is happening, which is that plants are actually being co-opted by sort of their microbiomes and that all plants' shapes are perhaps determined by microorganisms living on and around them, not the plants themselves,

not the genes of the plants themselves necessarily, and that this bokehla plant is just somehow more susceptible to the kind of biome cloud of other plants. So that introduces this other concept, which is like multi-species co-option. That's perhaps not even about the plant itself. Just also, you know, intelligence can take many forms. I mean, I've just sort of, wow.

Yeah, you are really putting ideas into my head now, because I'm imagining that if plants are sensitive to chemicals, to, you know, changes in light, to vibrations, maybe, to all of these sort of like, you know, stimuli to the presence of insects, et cetera. Well, then I'm almost imagining kind of like a, like a field of sensation, like around a plant,

like all this possible information that it could pick up on. And this one plant has evolved the capacity to pick up on many different sources of information, some of which might be invisible to us. In the same way that I don't know what my dog is smelling when she's super interested in smelling a tree, there's some sort of information there that I can't pick up on, but I can imagine it, you know?

And there's some similar suite of stimuli that this plant is picking up on, but it is able to recombine them in a novel way and then change its own literal physical extension shape, color, right, in the world as a result of picking up on that information. What else do you call that but intelligence? Totally, yeah, exactly.

I mean, this is just a theory. Yeah, when I say cutting edge, we will hopefully know more in 10 or 15 years. I wouldn't hold your breath, but it is exciting. And you talked a little bit about the dot your dog sense. I mean, it's about these umvelts, which is something Ed Yong writes about very beautifully in his most recent book, Immeasurable World,

about these realms of environmental experience and sensation that other creatures have that we can't even imagine. I mean, what your dog is going through when it smells something, when they smell something is beyond anything we could possibly comprehend. This is also one of my favorite areas

where I love it when stuff that, in a previous time of my life, I used to be a very hard nose skeptic. You can tell if you've seen my work, but stuff that used to seem to me to be woo woo, right? Or nonsense, I start to see, hold on a second, there actually might be scientific basis for it. Not in, oh, there's some supernatural force that we can't comprehend. No, the actions of natural forces might be so complex

that, you know, we can actually pick up on things in a deeper way. You know, I think about like, this is gonna sound so stupid, but my girlfriend has a horse. She loves the horse very much. And she talks to a, sounds so stupid, but my girlfriend has a horse. She loves the horse very much. And she talks to a, she occasionally will have a horse

psychic come by to communicate with the horse and tell her what the horse needs, right? And, you know, so she says, you know, and then my girlfriend would be like, oh my God, she like knew that the horse used to live in a grassy area, but now she lives in a new barn where there's less grass. And she says that the horse is sad about that. How did the horse psychic? No, right?

And so my first instinct is like, well, it's cold reading. It's the same way that any sham psychic works. They're picking up on your body cues and they're just telling you what you wanna hear. And you're easily fooled, right? But then on the other hand, I know enough about horses,

via my girlfriend, I know enough about horses, how smart they are, how much they pick up from people, et cetera, that they're very complex animals, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that there's a communication happening that some people might be a little bit better at than others. And this person might describe themselves as a psychic. They still might be doing something kind of real, right? And what you're describing to me is like similar with plants that, you know,

if someone were telling me, oh, my plants are intelligent and they, you know, they have emotions and I'd be like, oh, that's kind of stupid. Except the more detailed you get into how the biology actually works and how complex their lives are and how little we know about them, you just start to enter a spooky realm. And I, again, for the skeptics in the audience, I'm not saying that there's anything

supernatural happening. I'm talking about the more detailed you get in what evolution actually does and the capacities it actually gives us and the sort of like very, very specific interactions it produces, it can produce like results that are actually surprising to us and have a spookiness to them.

Does that make sense? It totally does. And you know, as a science journalist, I came to this topic with a tremendous amount of skepticism and a tremendous amount of wariness, because haunting this entire process of reporting this book was this book from the 70s called The Secret Life of Plants, which maybe a lot of people

would remember because it made this huge impact on the popular culture. It came out in 1973. There was a feature film about it. Stevie Wonder wrote the soundtrack. It's a really good soundtrack. But it was mostly this collection of extremely woo-woo plant stuff presented a scientific fact for which things couldn't be replicated scientifically. And this is where people started talking to their houseplants, or this is where the idea that plants enjoy classical music

more than rock and roll comes from. There was a CIA agent who claimed that the plants could beat his malevolent thoughts about, you know, he pictured lighting a plant on fire, and he hooked up a polygraph test to his house plant and the polygraph went wild when he thought about this. So these were all things that entered culture as fact because they came in the form of a nonfiction book.

And botanists were scandalized. It basically tanked the field of plant behavior research for about 30, 35 years because no one wanted to fund this. It was all such an embarrassing episode. But now we're coming back around to, you know, we have better technology. The genomic revolution has really matured since then. There's so much plant science that sciences can now verify. This is not to say anyone's ever verified plants, plants reading your mind or enjoying

classical music. That's still in the realm of the woo woo, but we are able to answer questions rigorously now that would have seemed quite mystical 30, 40 years ago, which is very exciting. And I mean, I tried to just stick to peer-reviewed research, or I did only stick to peer-reviewed research, and that was enough.

You know, the things that we can verify now are wild enough, that's all you need. Yeah, and it's one of my favorite, like where I've come in my skepticism is I no longer believe in super, I still don't believe in supernatural phenomena, but the reason I don't believe in them is that the natural world

is plenty weird enough and can't explain all of the, you know, purported supernatural phenomena out there. But the reasons are even more interesting and spooky than the purported supernatural phenomena, you know, and I feel like this is an example of that where like, yeah, plants are able to sense each other in this really detailed way. Like, it clearly is the case based on what you're describing in a way that we actually don't understand. There's actually exciting new research to be done. Exactly.

I find all this stuff so fascinating. Well, I want to talk about what we, what this changes for our understanding of plants. Because, you know, you say that, okay, if we understand plants as intelligent to some degree, and there's, even though there's still a question of definition of what we mean by that, well, we treat things differently when they are intelligent. If you ask the average vegetarian to tell you

why they are a vegetarian, apart from the environmental reasons, of which there are plenty good ones, and those are enough on their own for plenty of people, a lot of folks will tell you, they will make a moral argument based on intelligence or consciousness or the ability to feel pain or communication or et cetera, right?

And so, I mean, look, it would be very reductive and cliche for me to say, well, should we not eat plants either? Like, but I do think we're wading into those waters. So how does it make us, how does it make you feel differently about plants? And is there a moral dimension that comes out of this? Yeah, I mean, this is like classically,

like if I'm at a party talking about what the heck I've been doing for the last few years, inevitably someone's like, but what are the vegans gonna do? And that's fair. I will never advocate for not eating plants. We are animals that absolutely must eat plants. But-

You gotta eat something. Oh, and by the way, we haven't even gotten into fungi, is who which are an entirely different kingdom that we also eat. Well, I don't know, There's enough Netflix documentaries about fungi already about them communicating. So let's just, maybe we can accept as a given that fungi are also weird and cool and intelligent.

Oh my God, then they're like constituting. It's really hard to decide where a plant ends and a fungi begins, because they're hooked into every single plant root grown in the wilds and kind of constitute some of their most basic functions. It's just what, I mean, yes, exactly. Fungi are very cool.

Okay, so please go on. But so in terms of eating plants, I think that once you acknowledge that something is not passive, that it has an inclination toward life as all living things seem to do, that it can kind of determine the trajectory of its life based on information it's receiving from its environment.

These are all things, whether or not you want to call that intelligence or not, that suggest a certain animacy. And it becomes very hard to exclude something from our moral imagination once we imagine it as having a lifestyle of its own and a culture of its own. And what do we do with that information? I mean, we have to eat. Plants make all of the sugar that we have ever consumed, all of the glucose that we've ever consumed. Even if

you're eating an animal, the nutrient, the sugar you're getting from that animal, the protein, everything was built from glucose plants first made out of sunlight and air and water through photosynthesis. So I think acknowledging our incredible dependence on them is actually some way that they can enter our moral imagination, the fact that we simply cannot live, breathe anything without them. And I think it does something else, which

is that it forces us to reckon with the fact that our lives, the continuation of our lives is predicated on taking the lives of other living things. And that's not such a bad thing to have to live with as a concept. If you acknowledge that there's an inherent violence, so to speak, in the continuation of your life, maybe that could help introduce a certain amount of respect

and appreciation for all these other creatures that are making our lives possible. And of course, there are, you know, most indigenous cultures, if not all, have been reckoning with this forever. And we're just now, you know, the rest of us are sort of slowly waking up to this. But it engenders a certain respect at a certain level of awe.

And I think what can be done with that is a kind of move away from just indiscriminate destruction, which is our relationship to plant life and most nonhuman life. Now, you know, we don't have to quite live in the way we do. We have to eat plants. We have to kill them for our continued survival. But is there are there ways we can farm that take into more account their actual lifestyles, the fact that they communicate, the fact that they're very good at defending themselves when able to, you know, live in situations that allow for that? Do we, you know, it starts to make certain things feel ridiculous. Like, you know, I think about mangrove forests

that just get ripped up so they can put it in a hotel. Like, once you include plants in your sort of ethical imagination, because you recognize them as living creatures that they are, it becomes much harder to do that without any sort of stumbling over the ridiculousness of it. Right. I mean, you might have a hard time making that argument

to the hotel executive to say, hey, the mangroves have agency. You know, they have lives too. Like this is a huge psychological shift to make, but I also see that once you are able to make it and see yourself as dependent, I love seeing yourself as dependent on these other creatures,

that it can give you more of a sense of yourself as being a member of a web, rather than someone at the top who's dictating for all of these other creatures that are below you. Exactly. That could end up giving you, you could end up making healthier decisions for all of you other creatures that are below you. Exactly. That could end up giving you, you could end up making healthier decisions for all of you as a result

when you think of yourself that way. Is that getting close to it? I absolutely think that's true. I mean, some other, another realm to think of this in is the world of law and how plants might or could be treated legally. I mean, there's been a small but growing movement of Earth law where people argue for the right of an ecosystem or a river

or these non-human entities to have legal standing. And there's been some attempts to bring cases on behalf of plants or where plants are the constituent that the case is being brought in favor of. And I think that could be fascinating. I mean, already ships have a legal personhood. They get the female pronoun in the courts and we get lots of things that aren't humans legal standing.

And what would it look like to you? Corporations certainly have legal standing. There you go, exactly. They literally do. So why not ecosystems as well? Like they are abstract collections of things that all have an intent and an agency and why not grant them a legal status?

Exactly. And there's legal scholarship on this now. I mean, I wouldn't say we're very close to this becoming a norm, but we're getting somewhere, at least in the thinking part of this. What has been the biggest change for you personally as a result of diving into all of this work? Oh man, now when I go to a park,

which is most of my interactions with plants living in a city, I cannot not feel like I'm just surrounded by a billion little aliens living out there their wild plant dramas. I think I've always appreciated plants, but seeing them as individual entities with lifestyles and interpersonal dynamics is a huge one. It really changes the sort of general wash of green into a collection of creatures that are incredibly diverse and distinct. And you think about the world of plants,

and you don't necessarily realize that the difference between two species of plants is as dramatic as the difference between a cod and a toucan or something like that. You know what I mean? So just this incredible sense of odd, impressive, I'm just constantly impressed. And I also particularly love vines now because there's so much amazing work on how vines locate things to grow on

and how they make choices about how to grow or how to twine. And when I see, there's a lot of vines growing up chain-link fences in New York and can't help but commend them for their resourcefulness. There's a series of vines just growing all over my building right now that recently hopped across. It's like from our neighbor's yard.

It's been growing on our fence. They're beautiful flowering vines. And they recently hopped across to our building and are now growing on our building. And we're so excited to now have the vines on our building as well. They're coming for you. I mean, look, my mom was a botanist and she told me when I was a kid about, you know, plant blindness, how most people can't even tell

the differences between plants, much less think about them. And the fact that you are, you know, bringing this new perspective to me and everybody is just so cool. I can't thank you enough for being here. The name of the book is called The Light Eaters. You can get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books,

if you wanna support the show and your local bookstore. But Zoe, where else can people find it and where can they find your work? Anywhere books are sold, the audio book is fun. I got to read it and I'm on Twitter and just all over the place, Zoe Schlanger on Twitter. Thank you so much for being here, Zoe. It's been wonderful.

It's been great to be here, great talking with you. Well, thank you once again to Zoe Schlanger for coming on the show. If you loved that interview as much as I did and you want to check out her book, you can get it once again at factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well.

Of course, if you want to support the show directly you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash adam conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. You can join our community book club. We have so many other wonderful community features but for 15 bucks a month I will read your name in the credits of this very podcast and put it in the end of every single one of my video monologues. This week I want to thank Eden Welch, Patrick Flanagan, Kratone, Linz Lat, Andrew Empurafoy, Marcus Mitchell, and Vanessa Russell. Thank you so much for supporting the show.

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So until next week, we'll see you next time on Factually. ["Factually"] That was a HeadGum podcast.