The secret lie of plants

Now, usually, I would never pick up a book titled "The Secret life of plants", but it was recommended to me by a friend and fellow bibliophile.

"The secret life of plants - A fascinating account of the physical, emotional, and spiritual relations between plants and man."  - Sounds interesting, doesn't it? It even has the Oxford style of comma placement that I support. I imagined a portal into a mind blowing universe of plants that I had no ken of until now; Well-reasoned theories backed by immaculate experiments unequivocally laying the ground for the next step in human-flora interaction. Instead I found a book riddled with inaccuracies and wishful thinking. Homeopathy has devised better biased experiments to further their cause. This is just an incompetent attempt.

Ben Goldacre's "Bad science" is a book I regularly recommend as required reading for anyone who wants to survive in this world intellectually. Although the primary target of Bad Science was homeopathy, TSLOP can compete for the top spot just as well.

The first hint (if getting kicked in the brain can be considered a hint) was right up there on page 7 when an experiment was unverifiable in the presence of a third party. The experiment was supposed to demonstrate activity in a plant against stimulus as measured by a galvanometer. The plants, however, produced no measurements whatsoever. Instead of accepting this as a failure of the experiment, the incident is used to forward an even more absurd theory - plants can go into faint in the presence of danger; In this case the danger being the observing physiologist who would experiment on plants.

Another example of such erroneous reasoning is displayed when the plant did show some activity on the galvanometer without any overt stimulus. Now this activity is attributed to the experimenter eating a cup of yogurt as it contains micro organisms. Fallacious argumentation is still acceptable as long as it is consistently fallacious.

Such examples abound in the book that fly against the most basic principles of empirical reasoning and scientific experimentation.

This is not to dismiss the entire concept of plant physiology. JC Bose has done some fine work in the area and other scientists continue to further his research.

This book, however, instead of furthering the cause, in fact harms the entire community of scientists in the field by unnecessarily aggrandizing the impact of the experiments and a religious route of argumentation that twists its way through the valleys of inaccuracies , and the hills of improbability to arrive at the fictional destination of the unprovable hypothesis. This much belabored metaphor is of much higher quality than the contents of TSLOP, which i abandoned at page 47.

P.S: the cover art is infantile.