- Plant perception (paranormal) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View AfD | edits since nomination)
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There is no such thing as paranormal plant perception, this is not an independent field of research and the article is misleading as what the article describes is the "Backster effect". Most of the sourcing on the article refers to Cleve Backster. He is the only person in history to hold such ideas. The majority of this article is just citing Backster's experiments which is mostly duplicated material from his own Wikipedia article. There is a main article on plant cognition. I suggest that this article should be deleted and any information if needed in the "research" section of the article can be merged into Cleve Backster's own Wikipedia article which also contains criticism of his experiments. This article serves no purpose.
The two recently added single lines on the article about Jainism and Manichaeism are off-mission and belong on the plant soul article which is a religious belief. I suggest the article to be deleted and redirected to Cleve Backster. Psychologist Guy (talk) 17:29, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Paranormal-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 18:05, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- Keep. Yes, the nominated page is about stuff that is WP:FRINGE. But the pagename is the right name for that kind of stuff. On the other hand, the plant cognition page mentioned by the nominator is equally fringe. It makes the counter-scientific assumption that tropism and related kinds of plant responses to environmental stimuli are equivalent to cognition. For this reason, I believe that the nominated page should be kept, and a lot of rewriting is, instead, needed. Plant cognition should be largely merged into the page nominated here, rather than the other way around. Some parts of the cognition page are actually based on real physiology, and should be merged, instead, into the physiology page (and any non-scientific stuff there should be relocated in the opposite direction). So, while I agree with the nominator that we do not need both the paranormal and the cognition page, the one that should really be deleted (well, actually, just made into a redirect via a merge) is actually the cognition page. The paranormal page should be kept as the page that covers the various counter-scientific ideas that have been promoted over time. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:55, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- I agree that all this type of fringe content related to plant intelligence or "plant neurobiology" needs its own article away from the mainstream plant physiology article on perception. That is why I expanded the plant cognition article which unfortunately has the wrong title. All the WP:RS refer to the this fringe field as "plant intelligence" not plant cognition. I would support merging Backster's content on this article into the plant cognition article which should be renamed plant intelligence. The "plant intelligence" field is supported by botanists and philosophers such as Tony Trewavas, František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso, Peter V. MInorsky and Paco Calvo and is supported by plenty of reliable sourcing. However, there is no reliable references calling their research "paranormal". What they are promoting is definitely fringe but it isn't paranormal. Psychologist Guy (talk) 01:24, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- I think we are making some progress towards consensus now, thanks. We seem to agree about a 2-article solution, and the question comes down to the pagename for the one that isn't Plant perception (physiology). I think there's a reasonable logic, based on WP:COMMONNAME, to go with "intelligence" as the catchall. But instead of deletion, I'd prefer to keep the other names as redirects. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:08, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus. Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Just Step Sideways from this world ..... today 23:20, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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