[mellavora]

Well, given the overwhelming emerging evidence of social attention and behavior in plants, and given that it makes evolutionary sense that "social attention" would provide a fitness advantage in any environment where there are other actors,

the only reason to doubt it would be an assumption that "attention to social information" can only happen in creatures with an complex central nervous systems. Which requires rather constrained definitions of "attention", "social", and "information"

ok, there is another reason to doubt it. inertia. We've been taught/told that a complex CNS is what makes intelligence, and it is hard to get away from that idea.