Not long ago, it was believed that animals (and human babies) couldn't feel pain. Nowadays it's a ridiculous notion, but it was born of the idea that a certain animal was "exceptional" among all those others and has all these special properties, granted by God, that no other animals possess. That's not a belief that should be the "scientific" default anymore.
Depends on what you mean by language. If you mean "a structured system of communication", then it absolutely is. The only modern scientific rejection of birds songs as language is based around the definition of the word "language".
They're saying many different things such as "I'm ready to mate", "I'm hungry", "Stay away", "Come here", and "Predator nearby". Not only that, but birds are able to specify which kind of predator is nearby.
There's a resistance to these ideas that goes beyond objective science, and it's because we were previously basing our understandings on faulty assumptions. There's even a term for it, "human exceptionalism".
[0] https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one...
Different people, different ideas.
"chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication"" - without context it may have been a perfectly reasonable supposition.
"open ended musing about the gaia hypothesis" - hard to tell if it's a few or endemic without examples
But yes, I've seen people suggest that photo-receptivity amounts to consciousness, that amoeba can feel sensation, that the human genome is complex and can be reasonably assumed to host its own form of consciousness, and that chemical exchanges between plants amounts to full fledged communication, without any limiting qualifications.
>"chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication"" - without context it may have been a perfectly reasonable supposition.
Perhaps I can add your endorsement of this view to the list, and we can later see if your view is brushed off belonging to a small minority of nutters.
As for "Perhaps I can add your endorsement of this view to the list..." please be careful. Communication requires an exchange of information. If the exchange is in the form of chemicals, that's fine as communication is happening via chemical exchange. But whether chemical exchange alone IS communication is a philosophical question[1]. All I'm saying is that you may be misrepresnting or misunderstanding other people's stated position. Again, without links to read I can't judge.
[1] I'd say yes it is but am open to being shown wrong. It probably depends on whether you believe conscious intent is required. I say no, others may say yes, it is needed.
See also: bacteria and fungi
For some reason that principled caution goes out the window once we start talking about plants.
Here on HN I've seen folks equate photoreceptivity to consciousness, chemical exchanges between roots to full fledged "communication", and indulge in open ended musing about the gaia hypothesis. Practically everything is game and there's no telling how seroius people are being or if they're just getting lost in their own metaphors.