Do plants "think"?

[michel]

It's a million-monkey thing, harmony.
Given millions of species, over millions of years, over millions of generations, it would be statistically very unlikely that some very clever-appearing adaptations wouldn't appear, and, given Natural Selection, these would tend to be retained.

Exactly, what harmony isn't taking into account are the 999,999 mutations or adaptations that didn't work.

It doesn't detract from the beauty of life, nor from the value of it.

 

[Druidus]

However, it should be noted that such a specifically adapted plant is a poor survivor of crises. Anything that wiped out those butterflies and allowed a new species to take over the area would end the protection of those plants. Perhaps they could adapt to the new conditions, perhaps not. Have their traditional defense systems deteriorated since the development of this egg-mimicking system?

Plants like ginkoes are flexible survivors. They've been here since before the dinosaurs and they'll probably be here long after us. Why? Because they are not as specialized. They can readily adapt to new conditions.

If plants think, why don't they recognize that flexibility is more important on a long scale than specialization (which might help in the short term)? Instead, they adapt for the short term, as natural selection would predict, not "plant thought".