Have you actually read the book "Secret Life of Plants"?
Or, are we relying on the wisdom of "most" botanists here?
´After I read it, pseuda-science would not be the word I would choose to describe it.
I am yet to read another interesting book, such as that one, on plant life written by these scientifically critical botanists.
Any suggestions?
Working in botany, I have yet to find anyone in the field who agrees with the all the findings in "The Secret Life of Plants", and the evidence and the manner in which it was collected, is very unscientific.
It was a very popular book, but most eminent botanists describe it is psuedo-science.
As Dr. David Hershey said:-
I was not aware there was a video but the experiment you describe is detailed in the #1 bestselling book of that title by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. It also contains a lot of other botanical pseudoscience as does its less successful sequel, Secrets of the Soil. The supposed beneficial effect of some types of music on plant growth even inspired Stevie Wonder to release an album of music to grow plants by! Art Galston wrote a rebuttal to the Secret Life of Plants book titled "The unscientific method" (1974. Natural History 83(3):18,21,24).
Most of that type of botanical pseudoscientific research was later tried by actual plant scientists, who could not confirm the results. I do not believe a lot of it was published because it represented negative results that would not look too good on the resume of a legitimate scientist. A 1990 Cell article 60:357-364 reported no effect of music on mRNA changes that could be induced by touching the plant, Arabidopsis.
Pseudoscience is a good topic to add interest to botany classes. A close-to-pseudoscience theory is hydrotropism, which most college textbooks say does not exist but precollege biology books say is valid. See Hershey, D.R. 1992. Is hydrotropism all wet? Science Activities 29(2):20-24.
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