Several of the “tastier” plant news items for December 2013 relate to topics that were previously ruminated on here within the past year.
So, why not finish off our 2013 “banquet” of plant news with a trip back to the howplantswork.com “buffet table” to re-sample some of this year’s posts.
The topic of GMO plants appeared several times during 2013 in this blog, including GMO? OMG! and Transgenic Plants – Reality Check. Also, back in July, I offered an ebook on this subject called “Plant Trek”.
The topic of plant “intelligence” has come up in this blog on several occasions, most recently last September in a post entitled Smarty Plants – On Plant “Intelligence”, the “Vegetal Life” and Philosophical Botany.
There’s a lot of skepticism, especially among plant scientists, in interpreting plants’ responses to their environments as some sort of “intelligence”, analogous to animals. Perhaps the best answer to the question of plant “intelligence” is provided by Prof. Tobias Baskin in a letter to the New Yorker in response to Pollan’s article.
I expect we’ll hear more on these and many other fascinating subjects about plants in 2014. With a bit of luck, we’ll be here to tell you about them.
Cheers!
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