Would intelligence provide advantages to plants or not? If so, is it too energetically costly or why has it not evolved? Could we make plants smart with synthetic biology?
Different environmental pressures separate different development at levels of the tree of life. Plants have nervous system like networks for sensing the environment, but nothing like that witnessed in higher animals. Reason? Plants do not these networks for survival.
Why don't humans have wings? Clearly there would be some selective advantage to such an adaptation, but yet we don't have wings. My point is that there are many forces at work that dictate whether a trait will evolve and become fixed, not just its selective value. Evolution is a blind watchmaker and there is much contingency and co-incidence involved in the emergence of a trait such as environment, population size, mutation rates etc. The fact that plants have no detectable intelligence probably has little to do with how useful it would be and more to do with population genetic factors.
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- Biological Science
- Biota
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