The Intelligent1 Plant

Michael Pollan

人類是萬物之靈，有著豐富的情感、高超的智慧和強勁的行動力。相比之下，花草樹木一榮一枯，往復經年，似乎只是人們栽培觀賞、吟詠寄情的對象，沒有自己的思考和情感可言。但是有些科學家可不滿足于這樣主觀的判斷，他們渴望解開植物生命智能的奧秘。

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，一本書宣稱植物有感知能力，有情緒，比起搖滾樂更喜歡古典樂，且能夠在幾百英里以外感應到人們的思想，該書出現在《紐約時報》紀實作品暢銷書榜上。sentient： 有感知能力的；being：存在，生命；nonfiction： 非小說類紀實作品。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·湯普金斯和克里斯托弗·伯德寫的《植物的秘密生命》，展示了一種頗為有趣的混合：合法的植物科學、拙劣的實驗，以及在新時代思潮滲入主流思想的背景下能夠激發大眾想象力的具有神秘色彩的自然崇拜。beguiling： 欺騙的，誘人的；mashup： 混搭；legitimate： 合法的，正當的；quack： 冒牌的，騙人的；New Age： 新時代，新時代運動（New Age Movement）的簡稱，是促進人類意識轉變、心靈回歸的一種運動；seep： 滲，滲透。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，中央情報局，美國政府的情報、間諜和反間諜機構；polygraph：測謊（實驗）；on a whim： 一時興起；hook up： 連接，接通；galvanometer： 電流計；dracaena： 龍血樹屬植物；houseplant： 室內植物，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： 點燃；rouse： 喚醒，激起；register： (在儀表上) 顯示；surge：（電）浪涌，驟強。“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，協作者。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. 他宣稱植物能夠在近距離對人類的想法（不論好的或壞的）有所感應，如果人對該植物很熟悉的話，感應的距離可以很遠。proximity： 接近；in the case of： 在……的情況下。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： 目擊，目睹；stomp： 重踩，踐踏；lineup： 陣容，一組人；suspect： 嫌犯。Backster’s plants also displayed a strong aversion to interspecies violence.9. aversion： 厭惡，反感；interspecies： 物種間。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……）開裂；parapsychology：通靈學，心理玄學。

In the ensuing11. ensuing： 隨后的；write up： 把……整理成文，詳細寫出。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，證實……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）留下印記。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： 氣質，性情；romanticism： 浪漫主義，（18世紀末19世紀初盛行的一種文學研究、藝術和音樂風格，注重人的情感與自然）；run through： 貫穿。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： 妨礙，阻撓；wary： 小心的，提防的；hint at：暗示；parallel： 共同點，相似之處。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. 也有一些人聲稱，《植物的秘密生命》一書使得一些試圖探尋神經生物學和植物生物學之間可能的同源關系的研究者開始反思：即植物比大多數人想象得更加聰明，更加接近人類——能夠認知、交流、處理信息、計算、學習和記憶。contend： 聲稱，爭辯；self-censorship： 自我檢查；homology： 同源；neurobiology： 神經生物學；phytobiology： 植物生物學；cognition： 認識，認知。

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. 植物神經生物學代表的是我們對生命認識的一種全新模式，還是會再次攪入《植物的秘密生命》所激起的科學渾水中，這取決于你在植物科學領域的交談對象。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，建議者；mute： 啞的，沉默的；immobile： 不能移動的，靜止的；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： 減少的，簡化的；organism： 有機體，生物體。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. 正是由于人類的自傲，以及植物生命發展的周期更加漫長，我們就認為它們沒有智力，相應的實驗也不可能成功。unfold： 發生，發展；dimension： 維度，規模。Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth.21. dominate： 控制，支配；compose： 組成，構成；biomass：（單位面積或體積內）生物的數量。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，痕跡。