Intelligence in Nature: The Sequel

“Narby's 2005 follow-up extended the Cosmic Serpent hypothesis into plant intelligence, fungal networks, and bacterial communication. By 2025, the science of plant sentience had moved from fringe to mainstream research program.”

Intelligence in Nature (2005) was Jeremy Narby's follow-up to The Cosmic Serpent, less autobiographical, more scientific, and focused on a specific question that the DNA hypothesis had generated: if plants communicate information through chemical and electrical signals, what is the nature of that communication, and can it be called intelligent?

Narby interviewed biologists working on plant signaling, mycelial networks, and bacterial quorum sensing. He was attempting to document what professional scientists were finding at the research frontier of plant and microbial intelligence, to show that the question The Cosmic Serpent had raised (whether plants can 'communicate' with humans through ayahuasca) was related to questions that mainstream science was actively pursuing through conventional methods.

In 2005, this was still fairly marginal territory. By 2025, it had become a significant research field. Suzanne Simard's work on mycorrhizal networks, published in Nature in 1997 and popularized in Finding the Mother Tree (2021), showed that trees communicate, share resources, and respond to each other's distress through underground fungal networks in ways that parallel nervous system function. Monica Gagliano's research on plant learning and memory published in mainstream peer-reviewed journals showed plant species modifying their behavior in response to experience.

The field that Narby surveyed in 2005 as an emerging and contested area of research had by 2025 produced textbooks, university programs, and a heated philosophical debate about what 'intelligence' and 'communication' mean when applied to organisms without neurons.

The Cosmic Serpent's central question, whether the plants have something to communicate and whether humans can receive it, has not been definitively answered. But the subsidiary question, whether plants have information to communicate at all, has been answered affirmatively by mainstream science.

Sources

• Narby, Intelligence in Nature (2005)
• Wikipedia, Jeremy Narby
• Simard, Finding the Mother Tree (2021)