As part of The Lyceum Project 2026, under the theme “Entangled Intelligence: Animate. Ancestral. Artificial.”, the National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, the World Human Forum, and the National Museum of Natural History Goulandris co-organized an event at the Museum on Thursday, 18 June, featuring Paco Calvo, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Murcia, Spain, and author of the book Planta Sapiens.
Welcoming guests from Greece and abroad, Fali Vogiatzaki, President of the Museum, highlighted the Gaia Centre as the most appropriate venue for a discussion on intelligence, nature, and humanity’s relationship with the living world. Referring to the vision of Angelos and Niki Goulandris, founders of the Museum in 1964, she emphasized that the future of humanity depends on a deeper understanding of and greater respect for nature. Nature, she noted, is not merely a resource but a source of knowledge, healing, and wonder.
Alexandra Mitsotaki, President and Co-founder of the World Human Forum, stressed that the event, as part of The Lyceum Project 2026, seeks to foster dialogue and interaction among three forms of intelligence: animate intelligence—the intelligence of nature and living systems; ancestral intelligence—accumulated through human experience, philosophical traditions, and Indigenous knowledge; and artificial intelligence—the machine intelligence that is rapidly transforming contemporary life.
In his lecture, Professor Calvo challenged anthropocentric, zoocentric, and neurocentric conceptions of intelligence. Rather than viewing the brain, the nervous system, or mobility as necessary prerequisites for cognition, he invited the audience to turn their attention to organisms that appear more distant from humans—such as plants and even unicellular life—in order to explore what fundamentally unites all living beings.
Drawing on examples from the plant world, Calvo discussed circadian rhythms, the folding and unfolding of leaves, plant melatonin, “plant jet lag,” adaptive responses to environmental regularities, and the capacity for learning without a brain or nervous system. These examples suggest forms of anticipation, communication, and adaptation that invite us to understand cognition as something deeply rooted in life itself.
A central concept of the lecture was co-evolution: living organisms do not evolve in isolation but through ongoing relationships with other cognitive agents. Calvo used the dynamic interaction between flowers and pollinators as an example to illustrate that intelligence may be understood not as a property of an isolated organism, but as something that emerges through networks of interaction, perception, and response.
He also called upon the scientific community to remain open to questions that may initially appear unconventional. The possibility that plants possess intelligence or sentience should not be dismissed simply because it challenges established categories or creates ethical discomfort. Scientific progress depends on asking better questions, designing better experiments, and maintaining the humility to recognize that future generations may regard many of our current assumptions about cognition as incomplete.
Nature ceases to be viewed merely as a resource and instead emerges as a source of knowledge, healing, and wonder. Consequently, addressing contemporary ecological, social, and technological challenges requires interdisciplinary approaches and ethical responsibility. The concept of intrinsic intelligence should not be confined exclusively to humans, animals, brains, or machines, but recognized as a property of the broader living world. Plants provide compelling examples of adaptation, anticipation, and responsiveness to environmental patterns, while evolution itself is more fully understood as co-evolution, shaped through networks of relationships, interaction, and interdependence.
The event concluded with a guided tour of the Herbarium of the National Museum of Natural History Goulandris for the speakers of The Lyceum Project 2026, led by Dr Dionysis Mermygkas, Head of the Museum’s Botany Department. Participants included Ruth DeFries (Professor of Ecology and Sustainable Development, Columbia University; Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School), Yadvinder Malhi (Professor of Ecosystem Science, University of Oxford), Morten Kringelbach (Professor of Neuroscience, Aarhus University; Director of the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing; Fellow of Linacre College), Niki Evelpidou (Professor, Department of Geology and Geoenvironment, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), and Emmanuel Stratakis (Research Director and Deputy Director, Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas).
The event is supported by Bodossaki Lectures on Demand (BLOD), the online lecture library of the Bodossaki Foundation (blod.gr).
Photo credit: V. Tsakalou
