One of the alien scientists commented to an alien reporter that humans have many advantages over slime molds, in terms of turning these humans into what he called “living computers.” He said, “Humans are more robust, and can keep their shape for a very long time, although they are slower-growing and lack the flexibility of slime molds.” When asked whether turning these humans into living computers might cause them distress, the alien laughed and said, “Of course not. No alien brain, no pain.” The alien also mentioned that in order to maintain quiet workplaces, the aliens normally cut the vocal cords of the human-computers. “Not that these vocalizations are indicative of any sort of primitive distress signal,” he said. “It just makes for a safer and more stable work environment.”
Pollan continues, “Mancuso was also working with Barbara Mazzolai, a biologist-turned-engineer at the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genoa, to design what he called a ‘plantoid’: a robot designed on plant principles. ‘If you look at the history of robots, they are always based on animals—they are humanoids or insectoids. If you want something swimming, you look at a fish. But what about imitating plants instead? What would that allow you to do? Explore the soil!’ With a grant from the European Union’s Future and Emerging Technologies program, their team is developing a ‘robotic root’ that, using plastics that can elongate and then harden, will be able to slowly penetrate the soil, sense conditions, and alter its trajectory accordingly. ‘If you want to explore other planets, the best thing is to send plantoids.’”67
The aliens continued, “If you want to explore other planets, the best thing is to send humanoids, which are robots made like humans.” When asked whether these humanoids would have intact vocal cords, the alien again laughed, and said, “I can’t see any reason why not. In space, no one can hear you scream.”
•••
Since I love so much of Stefano Mancuso’s work, my fervent hope is that secretly he’s as horrified as I am at some of the abuses of plants toward which some of his research aims, but he’s lending his talents and his name toward these destructive ends because he knows that’s the only way he can get grants, out of which he’ll be able to also pay for the projects he really wants to fund, you know, the ones that help plants.
Basically, I guess I’d rather it be the case that he’s making heartbreaking compromises (recognizing that plants pay the real cost of these compromises) so he can also use his voice as a powerful advocate for plants, instead of it being that he’s consciously or unconsciously attempting to divert the increasing and inevitable acknowledgment of plant intelligence back into the culturally acceptable realm of human supremacism.
I realize that in both cases the same research gets done (some of it liberating, some of it furthering enslavement), but the former case seems disheartening to me, and points toward the struggles and compromises many make within a capitalist system, performing destructive activities to raise money in order to do other activities that help those they’re harming when they work for pay.
And the latter case seems disheartening to me in a different, yet also altogether all-too-familiar way, as one of this culture’s ways of dealing with liberating ideas that are gaining enough recognition that they can no longer be ignored or ridiculed or crushed out of awareness, is to vigorously co-opt the ideas back into the service of existing bigotries and hierarchies. This happens all the time, as, for example, the movements for breaking the hegemony of Eurocentric and masculine stories through multiculturism got diffused and dead-ended into postmodern relativism, and the movements for women’s liberation and the rights of gays and lesbians got co-opted into servicing patriarchy through the misogynist mess that is queer theory, and environmentalism was transformed along the way from an attempt to save the real, physical world from biocidal industrial civilization toward attempts to “sustain” precisely the civilization that is destroying the world that the new “environmentalists” pretend they want to save (i.e., environmentalism has gone from being about saving wild places and beings toward promoting, for example, wind energy; just tonight I saw a dreadful interview with a so-called environmental publicist who was saying that environmentalists need to never use the words “Earth” or “planet,” and instead only talk about what they will do to “improve” human lives; or there’s this gem from The Nature [sic] Conservancy’s chief scientist, Peter Kareiva: “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people. . . . Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people.”).68 This culture excels at that co-optation, and I hope that the burgeoning understanding of plant intelligence isn’t being sucked into the service of atrocious ends, as this culture does to so many other movements, ideas, and ideals.
•••
There’s a third possibility, and this is the one I find most likely by far, which is that Mancuso, like pretty much all of us in this culture, has so fully internalized this culture’s unquestioned human supremacism that the dissonance between his love of plants and the exploitation of them inherent in some of this research never rises fully into consciousness. Or at least not enough to impinge on the research. This is pretty much the definition of an unquestioned belief.
•••
He’s got his own human supremacist blind spots. I’ve got mine (although by definition, I can’t see what they are). And you’ve got yours.
•••
The point here isn’t Stefano Mancuso. The problems are human supremacism and a system that socially rewards practices that harm nonhuman communities. This can lead people to take morally contradictory stances. For example, earlier I cited the scientist Anthony Trewavas, who is a fierce and unstinting advocate for a recognition of plant intelligence. Yet at the same time he is perhaps even fiercer and more unstinting in his advocacy for genetic modification and biotechnology, and in his criticism of organic farming (for standard industrial and pro-corporate reasons).
•••
One of the myths of modern culture is that science is value free. That’s nonsense, of course. Not only because reality is necessarily more complex than any analysis or interpretation of reality, which means that by definition, values must be imposed through what is and is not included in the analysis or interpretation; and not only because, protestations of some humans aside, the universe is far more complex than a human brain (and of course far more complex than a computer), and is far more complex than we are capable of thinking (and of course far more complex than machines are capable of computing). This myth of value-free science is only tenable if you’ve forgotten that unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture, and then if you presume that anything that questions those assumptions is “speculation” or “philosophizing” (as opposed to those more legitimate “analyses” that fail to question the assumptions).
It’s pretty funny, really, or would be if it weren’t killing the planet. At least some of us some of the time understand that science performed by those who work, for example, for Monsanto, may very well be tainted by self-interest (or in this case the interest of the corporation, which, because, as Upton Sinclair said, “It’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it,” takes us right back to a skewed sense of self-interest). At least some of us at least some of the time might laugh at the science performed by those who worked for tobacco companies in the middle of the twentieth century that purported to show that tobacco wasn’t harmful. Science is supposed to be “disinterested,” we always hear. And we always hear that if it’s not “disinterested,” then it’s not science. Never mind that, “‘For better or worse,’ said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences o
f individuals with huge amounts of money.’”69 I’m not sure how new this is; industry and industrialists (and the military-industrial complex) have driven science from the beginning. It is only because we want to forget all this that we pretend science is disinterested in the first place.
But even without this obvious conflict of interest, this is all just the same old shit we’ve been seeing all along: if you think plants communicate, you’re speculating, and if you think plants learn, you can’t get your work published; but if you want to torture plants into living computers, then you get a fucking grant, and if you figure out how to violate their very genes, you’ll win a fucking prize.
Oh yeah, I guess I forgot: science is value free.
•••
Here’s the point: research that in some way or another attempts to extend human control over the universe is considered value free. Hell, attempts by humans to control the universe—to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when—are in our very definition of how we know something is true.
But extending human control over the universe is a value. And it is a value that materially benefits (in the short term, so long as you don’t mind a murdered planet) the humans doing the research, and those funding the research, and those publishing the research, and those using the technologies that emerge from the research. They are not and can never be “disinterested.”
If a white person does research that facilitates the enslavement of members of other races, at least some of us would recognize the very real possibility that the white person’s “research” does not in fact represent reality, but instead has been skewed to rationalize the enslavement. How is it that when it comes to the enslavement of nature—which includes as much of the universe as we can manipulate—we suddenly get really stupid?
Our stupidity has the same source as would the racist researcher’s in the previous paragraph. This time we’ll misquote Upton Sinclair: “It’s hard to make a man understand something when his entitlement depends on him not understanding it.” Our stupidity in this case is an inevitable consequence of, and inevitable defense of, our human supremacism. It’s an inevitable consequence of a naturalistic [sic] philosophy that holds only human functionality to be true functionality, and only human (and in fact scientific) intelligence to be true intelligence. Of course attempting to extend human domination over as much of the universe as possible is seen as either value neutral or positive, no matter how much this attempted domination harms the real, physical world. Humans (and in fact industrial humans) are the only ones who matter. Industrial humans are the only ones who exist. Human functionality is real. Functionality in the real, physical world is not real functionality. A river serves no purpose till it is harnessed for electricity, transportation, and irrigation. A forest serves no purpose till it is converted into 2x4s.
You’d think that when unquestioned assumptions are the real authorities of a culture, and when this culture is killing the planet, that it might be long past time we questioned some assumptions, and long past time we questioned some values, and long past time we questioned what we perceive as true.
* * *
53 Ibid.
54 McGowan, “How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other.”
55 Mann has also spoken in favor of the oil and gas industry.
56 Standing dead trees are often homes for more creatures than are live trees.
57 “Survival of the fittest” is actually Herbert Spencer’s term, but Darwin later adopted it.
58 Mother Tree Sanctuary, http://www.mothertreesanctuary.org/#!mother-trees/c1l40 (accessed March 3, 2014).
59 Jane Engelsiepen, “Trees Communicate With Each Other,” Positive News, http://www.positivenewsus.org/trees-communicate-with-each-other.html (accessed March 3, 2014).
60 Does anyone else find his choice of names significant in terms of his worldview?
61 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 184–185.
62 Geoffrey Mohan, “Chimpanzees Make Monkeys of Humans in Computer Game,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-chimp-game-theory-humans-20140605-story.html (accessed June 11, 2014).
63 McGowan, “How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other.”
64 To eat is not the same as to attack.
65 Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant.”
66 Please recall the previous footnote about Paul Stamets calling slime molds fungi; between when Stamets said that and when Pollan wrote the current article, scientists changed their classification of slime molds.
67 Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant.”
68 Heather Smith, “Want Everyone Else to Buy Into Environmentalism? Never Say ‘Earth,’” Grist, http://grist.org/climate-energy/want-everyone-else-to-buy-into-environmentalism-never-say-earth/ (accessed March 17, 2014). Also, Peter Kareiva, R. Lalasz, and M. Marvier, “Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility,” Breakthrough Journal, 1, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 36.
69 William J. Broad, “Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing Science,” The New York Times, March 15, 2104, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html?_r=0 (accessed March 17, 2014).
Chapter Six
Wonder
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
E.B. WHITE
Slime molds are pretty cool, for a number of reasons.
First, they used to be classified as fungi, but recently were reclassified as amoebas. This gives me hope that someday some sapient classifiers may reconsider the whole Homo sapiens sapiens thing.
We’ve already talked about the next cool thing: slime mold’s ability to learn and remember. But there’s more coolness ahead.
Before we get to that, though, we should probably mention who they are. They’re tiny beings who feed on microorganisms like bacteria, yeasts, and fungi who live in dead plant material. One of their gifts to the larger community is that they can contribute to the decomposition of dead vegetation. When this food is abundant, they live independently as single-celled organisms. But, and here’s where it gets even cooler, when food is less common, these single-celled beings can join together and begin to move as one, often following scents toward new food sources. The individuals can change their shape and become different functional parts of this collective; for example, they can become a stalk that produces fruiting bodies that release spores.
Yes, that says what you think it does. They can transition from single- to multi-celled creatures. And then move as one. And they can morph!
This is precisely the opposite behavior of that predicted in many models proposed by mechanistic scientists. In the “run on the bank” model, and in the similar “grocery store running out of food” model, so long as there is plenty of money in the bank (or food in the grocery store), people are polite. They will wait in line. They will observe social niceties. But when resources become scarce, people push and shove their way to the front of the line. They lie and cheat and steal. They do not act communally. They in fact act anti-communally. But slime molds act precisely the opposite of what these models predict: when the going gets tough, slime molds recognize the importance of community.
•••
I want to mention the single stupidest argument I’ve seen against plant intelligence. It’s from an essay on the website of a scientific philosopher. Why doesn’t that surprise me? The essay first mentions that some scientists understood the existence of “plant signaling” (i.e., plant communication) as long ago as 1935, and then goes on to say, “If chemical signaling in plants warrants re-ev
aluation of our moral attitudes towards plants, then such a re-evaluation would have been appropriate in 1935. But it wasn’t appropriate in 1935, so chemical signaling shouldn’t warrant any change in ethical attitudes now.”70
Gosh, I can’t think of any moral attitudes from 1935 that warrant reevaluation. Well, except for maybe that thing about the moral attitudes of Nazis against Jews. Or the moral attitudes of whites against members of other races. Or the moral attitudes of men against women. Straights against gays and lesbians. The civilized against Indigenous peoples. This culture’s contempt for the natural world, indeed, its hatred. And so on.
And just so we’re clear, this was not on the website of some undergraduate philosophy student who is filled with that unbeatable combination of ignorance and certainty that for the most part only seems possible for those between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. The website is run by the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at a college of the City University of New York and the editor of a journal of scientific philosophy.
•••
Tonight I watched an old episode of QI, a British quiz show where the host asks strange questions of a panel of comedians, rewarding interesting and correct answers and taking away points (and making a general hullabaloo) when contestants give answers that are both boring and incorrect.71
The Myth of Human Supremacy Page 13