“It would be easy to get the idea from all this that Mimosa is some kind of genius, a veritable Einstein among vegetables. But there's no evidence for this at all. The reason all this work has focused on Mimosa is simply that its ability to move (and fast) makes it a convenient experimental subject, which in turn reveals just what a hasty bunch we are; other plants may well be smarter than Mimosa, but until very recently biologists had generally decided that it would take too long to find out.”