The Intelligent1 Plant

Michael Pollan

人类是万物之灵，有着丰富的情感、高超的智慧和强劲的行动力。相比之下，花草树木一荣一枯，往复经年，似乎只是人们栽培观赏、吟咏寄情的对象，没有自己的思考和情感可言。但是有些科学家可不满足于这样主观的判断，他们渴望解开植物生命智能的奥秘。

In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on theNew York Timesbest-seller list for nonfiction.2. 1973年，一本书宣称植物有感知能力，有情绪，比起摇滚乐更喜欢古典乐，且能够在几百英里以外感应到人们的思想，该书出现在《纽约时报》纪实作品畅销书榜上。sentient： 有感知能力的；being：存在，生命；nonfiction： 非小说类纪实作品。The Secret Life of Plants, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, presented a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream.3. 彼得·汤普金斯和克里斯托弗·伯德写的《植物的秘密生命》，展示了一种颇为有趣的混合：合法的植物科学、拙劣的实验，以及在新时代思潮渗入主流思想的背景下能够激发大众想象力的具有神秘色彩的自然崇拜。beguiling： 欺骗的，诱人的；mashup： 混搭；legitimate： 合法的，正当的；quack： 冒牌的，骗人的；New Age： 新时代，新时代运动（New Age Movement）的简称，是促进人类意识转变、心灵回归的一种运动；seep： 渗，渗透。The most memorable passages described the experiments of a former C.I.A. polygraph expert named Cleve Backster, who,in 1966, on a whim, hooked up a galvanometer to the leaf of a dracaena, a houseplant that he kept in his office.4. C.I.A.： 即Central Intelligence Agency，中央情报局，美国政府的情报、间谍和反间谍机构；polygraph：测谎（实验）；on a whim： 一时兴起；hook up： 连接，接通；galvanometer： 电流计；dracaena： 龙血树属植物；houseplant： 室内植物，盆栽植物。To his astonishment, Backster found that simply by imagining the dracaena being set on fire he could make it rouse the needle of the polygraphmachine, registering a surge of electrical activity suggesting that the plant felt stress.5. set...on fire： 点燃；rouse： 唤醒，激起；register： (在仪表上) 显示；surge：（电）浪涌，骤强。“Could the plant have been reading his mind?” the authors ask. “Backster felt like running into the street and shouting to the world, ‘Plants can think!’ ”

Backster and his collaborators6collaborator： 合作者，协作者。went on to hook up polygraph machines to dozens of plants, including lettuces,onions, oranges, and bananas. He claimed that plants reacted to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance.7. 他宣称植物能够在近距离对人类的想法（不论好的或坏的）有所感应，如果人对该植物很熟悉的话，感应的距离可以很远。proximity： 接近；in the case of： 在……的情况下。In one experiment designed to test plant memory, Backster found that a plant that had witnessed the murder (by stomping) of another plant could pick out the killer from a lineup of six suspects, registering a surge of electrical activity when the murderer was brought before it.8. witness： 目击，目睹；stomp： 重踩，践踏；lineup： 阵容，一组人；suspect： 嫌犯。Backster’s plants also displayed a strong aversion to interspecies violence.9. aversion： 厌恶，反感；interspecies： 物种间。Some had a stressful response when an egg was cracked in their presence, or when live shrimp were dropped into boiling water, an experiment that Backster wrote up for theInternational Journal of Parapsychology, in 1968.10. crack：（使……）开裂；parapsychology：通灵学，心理玄学。

In the ensuing11. ensuing： 随后的；write up： 把……整理成文，详细写出。years, several legitimate plant scientists tried to reproduce the “Backster effect” without success.Much of the science inThe Secret Life of Plantshas been discredited12. discredit： 使不可信，证实……是假的。. But the book had made its mark on the culture.13. make one’s mark on sth.： （在某事物上）留下印记。Americans began talking to their plants and playing Mozart for them, and no doubt many still do. This might seem harmless enough; there will probably always be a strain of romanticism running through our thinking about plants.14. strain： 气质，性情；romanticism： 浪漫主义，（18世纪末19世纪初盛行的一种文学研究、艺术和音乐风格，注重人的情感与自然）；run through： 贯穿。But in the view of many plant scientistsThe Secret Life of Plantshas done lasting damage to their field. According to Daniel Chamovitz, an Israeli biologist who is the author of the recent bookWhat a Plant Knows,Tompkins and Bird “stymied important research on plant behavior as scientists became wary of any studiesthat hinted at parallels between animal senses and plant senses.”15. stymie： 妨碍，阻挠；wary： 小心的，提防的；hint at：暗示；parallel： 共同点，相似之处。Others contend thatThe Secret Life of Plantsled to “self-censorship” among researchers seeking to explore the “possible homologies between neurobiology and phytobiology”; that is, the possibility that plants are much more intelligent and much more like us than most people think—capable of cognition,communication, information processing, computation,learning, and memory.16. 也有一些人声称，《植物的秘密生命》一书使得一些试图探寻神经生物学和植物生物学之间可能的同源关系的研究者开始反思：即植物比大多数人想象得更加聪明，更加接近人类——能够认知、交流、处理信息、计算、学习和记忆。contend： 声称，争辩；self-censorship： 自我检查；homology： 同源；neurobiology： 神经生物学；phytobiology： 植物生物学；cognition： 认识，认知。

Depending on whom you talk to in the plant sciences today, the field of plant neurobiology represents either a radical new paradigm in our understanding of life or a slide back down into the murky scientific waters last stirred up byThe Secret Life of Plants.17. 植物神经生物学代表的是我们对生命认识的一种全新模式，还是会再次搅入《植物的秘密生命》所激起的科学浑水中，这取决于你在植物科学领域的交谈对象。radical： 重大的，根本的；paradigm： 典范，范例；murky： 黑暗的。Its proponents believe that we must stop regarding plants as passive objects—the mute,immobile furniture of our world—and begin to treat them as protagonists in their own dramas, highly skilled in the ways of contending in nature.18. proponent： 支持者，建议者；mute： 哑的，沉默的；immobile： 不能移动的，静止的；protagonist：主角，主人公。They would challenge contemporary biology’s reductive focus on cells and genes and return our attention to the organism and its behavior in the environment.19. reductive： 减少的，简化的；organism： 有机体，生物体。It is only human arrogance, and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time, that keep us from appreciating their intelligence and consequent success.20. 正是由于人类的自傲，以及植物生命发展的周期更加漫长，我们就认为它们没有智力，相应的实验也不可能成功。unfold： 发生，发展；dimension： 维度，规模。Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth.21. dominate： 控制，支配；compose： 组成，构成；biomass：（单位面积或体积内）生物的数量。By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, “just traces.”22. by comparison： 相比之下；trace： 微量，痕迹。