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The Great Chain of Being is an ancient and intuitive idea. Just as we naturally order a rack of screwdrivers according to size, head type, and magnetism, Platonic philosophers imposed an order on things found in the natural world. They used properties such as being alive, possessing a soul, and moving around to arrange all living and non-living things into a divinely ordained hierarchy. In the various scala naturae that have been contrived, plants always linger somewhere just above rocks. Plato’s star pupil Aristotle once counseled Alexander the Great to deal with barbarians as though they were plants. Neither, he believed, had much of a soul to speak of.
A modern Aristotle, navigating the transition from papyrus to Twitter, might well be diagnosed with “plant blindness.” This handy neologism, coined in 1999 by researchers Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee, describes the tendency of people to ...
