July 17-20, Paco’s Talk July 17, 14:00 BST

Join Paco at the “Diverse Intelligences Summit”, held at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland!

Paco’s Talk: Planta Sapiens: Reflecting on Minds across the Tree of Life and within AI

The investigation of plant intelligence is here to stay. And yet, despite the growing body of literature, we appear not to be making enough headway. Controversies over complex plant behaviors are part of a long botanical tradition. But things are only getting worse in today’s academic ‘publish or perish’ culture (even worse, ‘publish then perish’ for young scholars). Fast science promotes quantity over quality. The result is lack of a common language and subsequent misunderstandings, misdiagnoses and construction of straw man arguments, and anthropomorphism of observations, among other perils. Many findings that have gripped the public’s imagination are proving extremely difficult to replicate. This is a serious threat that undermines the credentials of the field. In this context, self-reflection is very much needed. Having taken root, after almost two decades since the first symposium on the Society took place, the time is ripe to take stock and to ensure that the field has the resources to increase its long-term impact. In this talk I offer some reflections on the risk of underdelivering and how to avoid biases that lead to overinterpreting results. Advancing the field of plant signaling and behavior calls for inclusion and adversarial collaboration; for the exploration of the guiding role that complementary, rather than competing, models and theoretical frameworks can play. Having a long-term impact calls for “slow science” and for the nourishment of social interactions in the plant and cognitive scientific communities. The goal is to grasp the challenges the community faces in the forthcoming years.