The Power of Movement in Plants: Vegetal Dimensions in Darwin's Theory of Evolution

This chapter chronicles Charles Darwin’s research on plants, with particular attention to his 1880 The Power of Movement in Plants, co-authored with his son Francis. Darwin’s interest in plants was consistent throughout his life, and his research brought new knowledge to botany, provided grounds to reassert the importance of the plant kingdom in connection with the animal kingdom, and gave evidence for many fundamental elements of his theory of evolution. This view allows to highlight Darwin’s significant contribution to the debate and the research on the nature of plants, by proving that they possess sensibility, movement and a complex ability of interaction with the environment through their root tips. Darwin’s work on plants, however, was largely overlooked or underestimated by many botanists of his time, who never recognized him as a scientist in their field and wrongly assumed that his theory of evolution would apply only to the animal kingdom. Darwin’s research on plants was, instead, precisely proof that evolution was universal and constitutive of all living beings that co-evolve and coexist in the same ecosystems; and some of his most courageous theses on the vegetal-that plants possess sensibility, movement, and a complex ability to interact with their environments through their root tips—are now widely acknowledged among the bases of contemporary plant neurobiology.