(This article is part of a series of 5 posts, The Thinking Planet, exploring the universal nature of cognition in the living world. All concepts and examples are drawn from an analysis of my comprehensive work, “Silent Earth: Adaptations for Life in a Devastated Biosphere.”)

We think of our planet as being divided into two camps: humans, with our complex intelligence, and then everything else, running on simple instinct. But what if that division is wrong? What if the ability to sense, process information, and respond to it is not a rare gift but a fundamental characteristic of life itself?

In the book Silent Earth, I argue the biosphere is defined by the ubiquity of cognition. Not that a bacterium or a plant “thinks” like a human. Rather, it suggests that every living thing, to survive, must perform a crucial task: acquire information from its environment and respond adaptively (Trewavas 2014). This capacity for information processing—whether it happens in a brain or through the elegant molecular pathways of a single cell—is cognition.

When we look through this lens, the world transforms. We no longer see a planet of mindless automata but a global community of cognitive agents, each actively interpreting and shaping its world (De Waal 2009). This perspective challenges us to move beyond our human-centered view of intelligence and recognize the diverse and astounding ways that life knows itself and its surroundings.

In the next post, I’ll dive into the world of this hidden intelligence, exploring the remarkable cognitive abilities of the life forms we most often overlook: plants and microbes.

References

De Waal, F. B. 2009. The age of empathy: Nature’s lessons for a kinder society. Harmony Books, New York, 291 p.

Trewavas, A. 2014. Plant behaviour and intelligence. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 304 p.