Plant Philosophy and Interpretation: Making Sense of Contemporary Plant Intelligence Debates

Author(s):  
Yogi H Hendlin

Plant biologists widely accept plants demonstrate capacities for intelligence. However, they disagree over the interpretive, ethical and nomenclatural questions arising from these findings: how to frame the issue and how to signify the implications. Through the trope of ‘plant neurobiology’ describing plant root systems as analogous to animal brains and nervous systems, plant intelligence is mobilised to raise the status of plants. In doing so, however, plant neurobiology accepts an anthropocentric moral extensionist framework requiring plants to anthropomorphically meet animal standards to be deserving of moral respect. I argue this strategy is misguided because moral extensionism is an erroneous ontological foundation for ethics.

Author(s):  
James P. Dobrowolski ◽  
Martyn M. Caldwell ◽  
James H. Richards

2014 ◽  
Vol 111 (5) ◽  
pp. 2029-2034 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takao Araya ◽  
Mayu Miyamoto ◽  
Juliarni Wibowo ◽  
Akinori Suzuki ◽  
Soichi Kojima ◽  
...  

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Mairhofer ◽  
Craig Sturrock ◽  
Darren M. Wells ◽  
Malcolm J. Bennett ◽  
Sacha J. Mooney ◽  
...  

X-ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) allows nondestructive visualisation of plant root systems within their soil environment and thus offers an alternative to the commonly used destructive methodologies for the examination of plant roots and their interaction with the surrounding soil. Various methods for the recovery of root system information from X-ray computed tomography (CT) image data have been presented in the literature. Detailed, ideally quantitative, evaluation is essential, in order to determine the accuracy and limitations of the proposed methods, and to allow potential users to make informed choices among them. This, however, is a complicated task. Three-dimensional ground truth data are expensive to produce and the complexity of X-ray CT data means that manually generated ground truth may not be definitive. Similarly, artificially generated data are not entirely representative of real samples. The aims of this work are to raise awareness of the evaluation problem and to propose experimental approaches that allow the performance of root extraction methods to be assessed, ultimately improving the techniques available. To illustrate the issues, tests are conducted using both artificially generated images and real data samples.


1991 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. H. FITTER ◽  
T. R. STICKLAND ◽  
M. L. HARVEY ◽  
G. W. WILSON

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