Future perception in plants

Abstract

Although a few of the earliest naturalists, such as Theophrastus, made concrete observations regarding the sophisticated ways by which plants sense and respond to their environments, the prevailing attitude toward plants has been based on the Aristotelian paradigm, that at their low rank, slightly above minerals on Scala Naturae, plants are mere non-sentient soil-eating blobs. However, accumulating evidence demonstrates that plants are able to not only precisely gauge and respond to their immediate environments but can also perceive, integrate and adaptively respond to myriad internal and external signals and cues that are correlated with their future environments, in ways that maximize their life-time performance.