The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World

Abstract

In a research article, "Arabidopsis Plants Perform Arithmetic Division to Prevent Starvation at Night," scientists describe the ability of the diminutive mouse-ear cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana (hereafter referred to as "Arabidopsis"), to undertake nocturnal mathematical procedures.1 Laboratory evidence demonstrates that the cress measures its speed of consumption along with the time remaining until sunrise, then "arithmetically divides these two quantities to compute the appropriate starch degradation rate."2 The steady, calculated expenditure of starch enhances the plant's fitness overnight and, one could argue, the efficiency of photosynthesis in the early morning. Disappointingly (for plant studies scholars), however, by the end of the technical discussion we are left with neither trace, whiff, nor scratch of the performing plants themselves. Although the attributes of thinking and learning are fundamental to arithmetic in the human domain, we find Arabidopsis construed as a vegetal abacus; as a lean-green-counting-machine geared toward the ideal of efficient resource consumption. Framed in this discourse, the apparent aptitude of the species is downplayed by the article's conclusion, where mathematical precision is affirmed as crucial to molecular biology and, more specifically, to plant survival. It appears only as a tantalizing shimmer that Arabidopsis enacts a kind of intentionality (that of computational logic) associated with human intelligence.