Darwin Day Lecture: "Roots of Consciousness: Darwin's Botany and the Promise of Plants"
Join Tina Gianquitto, associate professor of Literature from the Colorado School of Mines who will speak on, "Roots of Consciousness: Darwin's Botany and the Promise of Plants."
Shortly before his death in 1882, Charles Darwin completed his last book summarizing his work on a decades-long fascination with the movement of climbing plants. Plant life, as shown in Darwin's books on the subject, is both active and intentional. Fascinated readers learned that climbing plants possessed volition and pursued objectives: they move “when it is of some advantage to them,” and “in manifest relation to their wants.” More dramatically, perhaps, Darwin argued that plants gather information about the world around them through tendrils and other structures that act “like the brain of lower animals.” The notion of volitional plants deconstructed any seemingly stable boundary between human and non-human, fauna and flora, and popular commentators looking both at the Darwinian plant world and at emerging theories of the mind and consciousness were driven to ask: “Are plants able to think?” And if they can, what does that mean?
RSVP at:
Tuesday, February 11, 2020 at 4:30pm to 6:30pm
Morris Library, Class of 1941 Lecture Room University of Delaware Library
Carlos Andres Mugruza Vassallo left a positive review 2/10/2020
Good lecture about several books fo Darwin work, I am very pleased to be there.