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We tend to think of intelligence and consciousness in terms of people and brains. To this day there are scientists who scoff at the idea that monkeys, dogs and farm animals, just to name a few, have anything that could be defined as real intelligence. They ascribe their smarts and clear acts of empathy to simply 'instincts'.
Scientists, industry, and governments have a vested interest for underestimating animal intelligence, and so they pretend to justify the horrible treatment animals receive in science labs, farms, abattoirs and in other places where they are tortured for our benefit. In their view animal suffering does not count because they are of lower intelligence.
Some scientists have gone as far as to say that some animals, such as lobsters who are cooked alive, or fish who die of suffocation, feel no pain. Research scientists says the same thing about a variety of animals they use in their experiments.
Doctors and advocates of abortion affirm that unborn babies feel no pain, so that it is perfectly ethical to tear them to pieces during abortion procedures. They make a living that way.
There are degrees of consciousness and degrees of intelligence. It does not all start and end with humans. We are just one type of organism in nature's endless process of creating and transforming life.
We all started as star dust, as romantics like to remind us. In other words, as inanimate material. And then something sparked what we call consciousness in some tiny microscopic creature, and complex life took off.
Academic Yuval Noah Harari warns that once we create an elite of artificially enhanced super-humans, then ordinary people (with a comparatively smaller degree of intelligence) will be placed on a lower rung, just as we do with animals today - vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment.
If intelligence is what we use to judge other creatures' basic rights, then that's what's ahead for natural humans like you and me in only a few decades into the future. Click Here to watch Video interview with Prof. Harari..
We continue to be surprised by new revelations about the life of plants and trees. Far from just being mindless life forms, they have extraordinary abilities to communicate with their environment, to form alliances with other plants and trees, and with animals as well, and to successfully fight off a variety of threats. When you look at the overall picture, it is obvious that they have intelligence, although in a form that is adapted to their needs.
The Daily Mail: Trees are intelligent, express emotions, communicate with each other, and make friends, says author Peter Wohlleben
- They evidently can transmit, receive, and interpret information.
Scientists are starting to ask whether trees possess intelligence and brains
It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each other, feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives and organise themselves into communities, it's hard to be sceptical.
Forests are super-organisms, much like ant colonies.
Research shows trees can distinguish the roots of their own species from other plants, and even pick out their own relations from other trees.
Some are so tightly connected at the roots that they even die together, like a devoted married couple.
Diseased or hungry individuals can be identified, supported and nourished until they recover.
Trees can also send warnings using chemical signals and electrical impulses through the fungal networks that stretch under the soil between sets of roots — networks known as the 'wood wide web'.
Over centuries, if left undisturbed, a single fungus can cover many square miles and create a network throughout an entire forest. Through these links, trees can send signals about insects, drought and other dangers.
Trees use displays of erotic perfume and dazzling adornment for sexual purposes just like many animals and birds.
Some African acacias defend themselves from hungry giraffes by pumping foul-tasting toxins within minutes of being under attack!
Some trees under insects attack send chemical summons for allied predatory insects who will eat the invaders.
For example, elms and pines call on parasitic wasps that lay their eggs inside leaf-eating caterpillars, condemning them to slow, painful deaths. Trees are prepared to wait for revenge.
The main reason humans cannot perceive how clever and complex they are is because we exist in such short time scales by comparison. Some trees live for thousands of years.
But the main reason is just plain human arrogance. We can't conceive that other life forms are capable of thinking and of helping their friends.
There's increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate with each other. More than that, trees can learn.
If that's true — and my experience as a forester convinces me it is — then they must be able to store and transmit information.
And scientists are beginning to ask: is it possible that trees possess intelligence, and memories, and emotions? So, to cut to the quick, do trees have brains?
It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each other, feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives and organise themselves into communities, it's hard to be sceptical.
Forester Peter Wohlleben believes trees must be able
to store and transmit information
I didn't always feel this way. In fact, when I began as a civil servant with the German forestry commission in the Eighties, I knew next to nothing about the hidden life of trees.
It was my job to look at hundreds of spruces, beeches, oaks and pines every day, to assess their readiness for the lumber mill and their market value.
About 20 years ago, while organising survival training and log cabin breaks for tourists, I began to rediscover the love of nature I'd had as a six-year-old.
Next, I noticed that visitors were enchanted by crooked, gnarled trees — ones that I would have dismissed because of their low commercial value.
I began to pay attention to more than just the quality of the trunks. I noticed bizarre roots, strangely intertwined branches, mossy cushions on bark . . . all kinds of wonders. Including, unbelievably, evidence of tree friendships.
Continue reading and see more images of beautiful trees
