The green plant as an intelligent organism
 
Tony Trewavas
Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, Mayfield Road, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JH, UK
*email: trewavas@ed.ac.uk
 
Intelligent behaviour, a complex adaptive phenomenon, is designed to increase fitness in variable environmental circumstances particularly those involving resource foraging and competition. Biologists suggest that intelligence encompasses the characteristics of detailed sensory perception, information processing, learning, memory, choice, efficient optimisation of resource sequestration with minimal outlay, self-recognition, and foresight by predictive modelling.  There is good evidence that individual plant species exhibit all of these intelligent behavioural capabilities. Plants should therefore be regarded as prototypical intelligent organisms, a concept that has considerable consequences for evolutionary convergence and investigations of whole plant communication, computation and signal transduction.
 
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