TM

Entangled Life

Rating

8/10

I give eight out of ten to virtually any book that keeps me engaged from the beginning to the end. Although there were parts of the book where I was zoning out due to excessive repetition of key ideas, a new mushroom fact, gadget, or philosophical mushroom idea would eventually pop out a few pages later and get me back to the flow. So it was an enjoyable read through out and hence it deserves and eight.

I suppose the key idea of the book is exactly what the title suggests but it only becomes obvious in hindsight. Fungi love to entangle themselves with other organism, often creating symborgs 1 that make us question where an individual ends and a symbiotic relationship begins. This is the recurring theme that weaves in and out of the story that Sheldrake paints. And I use the word paints deliberately because this book is not just a dry description of what fungi are. It’s a deep philosophical story that not only talks about how fungi played a potential role in our ancestral past and our probable futures, but also how they played a crucial role many millions of years before mammals even had a chance to evolve and how they will probably be one of the few organisms to survive whatever cataclysm that awaits us in the distant future.

I enjoyed this philosophical nature of the book because I felt like it gave me a glimpse into a brain of someone who lives and breathes mushrooms. But unfortunately it also at times felt like an unorganized and choppy volume of psychedelic ideas. The author clearly picked a writing style where each chapter had a main theme but before untangling it (pun intended) the reader had to go through a myriad of fun facts. These were sometimes amusing and sometimes well explained but equally often they were boring, too shallow to add anything to the main quest of the chapter or simply a repetition of some idea that has already been said 25 times before. And that comes from someone who believes in repetition of key ideas, it makes them stick, but there is some natural ceiling for when enough is enough.

So all in all, a good book to get people excited about fungi, teach them a lot of fungi fun facts and deliver the main message that fungi are not the only entangled species and maybe we have a lot to learn from them for many avenues of our own lives.

Synopsis

Mushrooms blur the boundaries of what’s an individual organism and what’s a symbiotic relationship of multiple organisms acting as a unit individual. This feature of their existence has puzzled scientists for decades and made us reconsider what we previously thought true both in biology and ecology. It also makes us ponder what’s the most optimal way to approach agriculture, waste decomposition, manufacturing and spiritualism.

Is a mushroom trip the mushroom borrowing our body for its own function? Do trees trade resources through an underground network of fungal connections? Can a mushroom mycelium be used as a natural computer? The book ponders and answers questions like these and many more.

Notes

  • plants made it out of water about 500 million years ago because they created a relationship with fungi that served as their root system - it took tens of millions of years before aquatic plants adapted to land life and were capable of growing roots. To this day about 90% of plants depend mycorrhizal fungi which share nutrients between plants (p. 4)
  • prototaxites were crazy large (probably) fungi that pre-date trees. We found fossils about 1m in diameter and up to 8m long/tall (p. 4)
  • biology: study of living organisms (within), ecology: study of relationships between living organisms (between) (p. 19)
  • “Science isn’t an exercise in cold-blooded rationality. Scientists are - and have always been - emotional, creative, intuitive, whole human beings, asking questions about the world that was never meant to be catalogued and systematized. “ (p. 21-22)
    • beautifully put, my question is: why do we love taxonomy so much? I love it as well, I want to learn how to name plants and fungi; I want to understand by what features I can tell them apart; and I want to understand how they live - but why? Why can’t I just let the nature be - and enjoy it without understanding?
  • “mycelium is a body without a body plan” (p. 55)
    • animals move by walking, they have a body and they move it in space and time. Mycelium “moves” by continuously growing and pruning its hyphae (the tips of its network) as it explores and later exploits the environment around itself. It doesn’t look for food and then eats it - like animals - it instead embeds itself into the food and prunes its own network accordingly; to optimize the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation of a food source.
  • the mycelial network conducts electricity and some research shows that different parts of the network send each other signals through the frequency of electrical pulses - this is much faster then chemical communication (p. 68-76) check Andrew Adamatzky and Pål Axel Olsson
  • “molds show up everywhere… eventually” - so simple, so true :) a quote form this video that was mentioned in the book when talking about how does the mycelium communicate within itself
  • lichens are a combination of algae and fungi - the fungi provides the ability to extract mineral and other compounds from rocks while the algae offers its photosynthesizing services. They are the first organism that made humans aware of the possibility of ‘symbiosis’
  • horizontal gene transfer is the ability of some organisms, mostly bacteria, to pass genes between themselves not through reproduction (vertical inheritance) but just by passing it to each other during their lifetimes. It’s how eukaryotes acquired a mitochondria in their cells - a single cellular organism engulfed a bacteria and its descendants became cells with a mitochondria. (p. 87)
  • organisms like lichens or mycorrhizal plants are sometimes referred to as holobionts or symborgs (symbiotic organisms, like cyborgs are cybernetic organisms) - they are a combination of organisms that behave as a unit - making the boundary between organism that make them up very blurry (p. 103)
  • Ophiocordyceps is a fungus that uses ants as its reproduction vehicle. It infects ants, engulfs about 40% of their body, and through yet unknown means manages to guide them up a tree to a leaf where it forces their jaws into a dead grip. When they die the fungus devours the rest of their body, sprouts a mushroom and showers its spores onto the rest of the ant colony underneath (p. 108-109)
  • Ergot mushrooms are somewhat poisonous mushrooms that can elicit hallucinations, sensations of intense burning and extreme muscle twitching. It is believed that some of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch have been inspired by observations of mass ergot poisoning. The same is said about reports of ‘dancing manias’ where hundreds of towns people between 14th and 17th century took to the streets and danced erratically till complete exhaustion and sometimes death. (p. 111)
  • lignin, the compound that makes wood wood, can be decomposed by only a very small number of organisms. White rot fungi are by far the most prolific lignin decomposers. They decompose lignin by using enzymes called peroxidases which release torrents of free radical molecules that break the tight carbon bonds that lignin makes. This process is called enzymatic combustion and results in a lot of CO2 emissions. In 2018, wood decomposition produced an estimated 85 gigatons of carbon while humans emitted around 10 gigatons. (p. 197)
  • Against the Naming of Fungi: a paper that claims that For 250 years mycologists have tried to reconcile fungal diversity with the Linnean fantasy of a divine order throughout nature that included unambiguous species. This effort has failed and today’s taxonomy rests on an unstable philosophical foundation. (p. 232)

  1. (symbiotic + organism) ↩