Do plants have green souls?
By Mark Renz
According to plant researchers S. Fornaciari and L. Arru, the plant Kingdom followed its own evolutionary path.
Nonetheless, say these researchers, plants originated from the same common ancestor and evolved following related mechanisms. Part of what we are able to identify and recognize in animals may also exist in plants. The problem is that we do not recognize it by first sight, since it comes from different paths, and it integrates in different systems, obeying different balance and function.
Fornaciari and Arru point out that in Rene Descartes' 1650 book, “The Passions of the Soul”, Descartes notes an important difference between animate and inanimate bodies. He postulated that the difference between them must be attributed to the soul, and that a single physical organ was the intermediary between soul and body. Descartes reasoned that the brain was the center of mental activity and the pineal gland was that single physical organ, because it is the only organ so close to the center of the brain, and for which there are not two separate sides.
Science may not be ready to proclaim proof of a soul or that it would be in the pineal gland if we have one, but Descartes' postulation may be worthy of further exploration.
No one knows of any counterpart to the pineal gland in plants, say Fornaciari and Arru, but it is known that melatonin and many other neurotransmitters that are typically human or animal, act constantly inside plants, regulating mechanisms and phenomena that, in many cases, we are still not able to detect.
(From “Hormones and neurotransmitter-like molecules interactions:
Introduction to a very preliminary study in plants.” – Fornaciari S, Arru L, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, as part of an international symposium called “Evolution in Communication and Neural Processing” on-line at http://www.geco.unimore.it homepage.
House of Nature (Paraphrased)
The wide house of Nature is built with many rooms, each having its own entrance. The physicist, chemist and biologist get in through different doors, each having his or her section of science and each thinking that this is his or her own property, separated from the others. From this house, the present division of the phenomena in organic, plant and conscious kingdoms belong. Such philosophical attitude of the mind lends itself to be denied. We must remember that all the investigations have the aim to reach knowledge in its entirety. – Sir JC Bose, (1858-1937)
mark@fossilexpeditions.com