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Fasciation: mutation in plants and A.I.

7 hours ago
3 min read

Fasciation is a form of genetic mutation that occurs in plants, causing them to grow in a deliriously surrealistic way. The fasciation mutation occurs in the meristem, which is the tissue responsible for plant growth. It has a very great capacity for replication, playing the role of “telling the plant how it will grow.”



Fasciation is a response of the meristem to some problem affecting the plant: chemical contamination, bacterial infection, or attacks by insects and parasites. However, the mutation does not represent lethal damage to the plant; it grows strong and healthy, it merely transforms physically as a necessary reaction to survive the infection.



Biologist and writer Stefano Mancuso does fascinating research work on the philosophy of plants. He says that the organizational systems we use in society are always “animal-centric,” that is, based on how animals function. But there is a universe of possibilities for thinking about life from a “plant-centric” logic. One of the topics addressed in the book The Revolution of Plants is how the plant teaches us about individuality and collectivity.



An animal has a central command system (brain, boss, motherboard) and systems that depend on commands (organs, employees, parts). Plants, however, have various autonomous and modular systems that do not depend on the intelligence of the commands of the central system. The plant has intelligence spread throughout its entire body. They are various intelligent organs constantly sending information to one another. A single plant unit is, in fact, a collective.



A very important premise that separates plants from animals is how they react to the destruction of individuality. According to the dictionary, an individual is something that, if divided in half, one of the parts will die. It is like an artist who copies someone’s idea and kills the exclusivity of the artist who created it first. An animal that is divided dies, but a plant that is divided multiplies. It sprouts, blooms, takes root, but above all: it undergoes mutation. The mutation does not kill the plant; on the contrary, it is what makes it survive in the new context in which it was inserted.



The creative capacity that the plant has to solve problems comes from the complex variety of information that it is always collecting and cross-referencing among its autonomous and intelligent modules. And it is possible to draw a parallel between this and artificial intelligence. The fascination with artificial intelligences usually comes from the algorithm’s ability to generate different combinations, and generally the different is associated with the innovative.



Very often, the incredible capacity of artificial intelligence as a tool ends up being misinterpreted and generating a fascination that can be sadly linked to the growing difficulty of accessing our creative capacity for research and recombination. A major impasse that leads us to seek in the machine what is missing in the individual is that contact with creativity involves confronting the way we deal with control. To experiment and recombine freely, one must let go of control and take it back only when necessary to follow a specific direction. To walk, order is needed, but to see better, one must think collectively and know how to adapt to chaos, and in this, plants have much to teach us.



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