Paco Calvo (b. 1971) is a philosopher of science and professor at the University of Murcia, specialising in plant studies. He is, among other things, the founder and director of the world’s first laboratory for plant neurobiology, MINT. His book Planta Sapiens: In Search of Plant Intelligence (co-authored with Natalie Lawrence) makes a significant contribution to the increasingly prominent posthumanist scientific thinking of recent decades, which rejects a linear, hierarchical view of evolution – organisms do not simply evolve from simpler to more complex forms. This has led to the recognition of the diverse capacities of animals, plants and fungi, which anthropocentric biases have often refused to acknowledge as “intelligence”. Although plants and fungi lack a central nervous system, they are capable of highly complex and sensitive forms of communication and interaction with the world, in ways that remain inaccessible to humans. Because plants neither move nor speak, it is easy to assume their sensitivity is inferior – but increasingly it appears that we simply do not know how to read them. Paco Calvo is one of the people teaching us how.
Paco Calvo
