Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I actually picked this book up for my 8th grader, for supplemental science curriculum, but ended up reading it myself after he liked it and started quoting facts from it. 

 

The book is about fungi, which are seriously fascinating. Originally classified as plants, fungi are now recognized as their own kingdom, with unique features and lifestyles that are as foreign to plants as plants are to animals. 

 

It is believed that fungi evolved after the first plants, which were aquatic algae. Fungi were the first to enable plants to move to the land, by serving as root systems. Even now that many plants have their own root systems, even these have turned out to be entwined with fungi internally and externally. 

 

And, well, that is one of the chapters in this fascinating book. 

 

Merlin Sheldrake sounds like the sort of name one would create for the Society for Creative Anachronism, but it actually is the author’s name. He looks the part too, and lists musician and home brewer as his other interests. But don’t let that fool you. Sheldrake is a legit scientist who spent an insane amount of time studying fungal networks in Panamanian rain forests for Cambridge, and continues to research for the Smithsonian. The book is nearly one-third notes and citations, representing the work of many who have studied fungi over the years, including himself. While written for the average reader, the scientific content in this book is high. And really nerdy, although in an interesting way. 

 

The book covers all the expected topics, from the origins of fungi and their symbiosis with plants, to the intertwining of roots and mycelium, to the way fungi acts like a mind, to the myriad of lichens, to the forest webs that share nutrients, to psychedelics, to the ways fungi may be able to help us undo environmental damage. All of this is a great deal of fun, with a lot of unexpected details - let’s just say that fungi were mostly ignored until a few decades ago, so our knowledge of them has exploded during my lifetime. 

 

Sheldrake, like many scientists, is not so much a coldly rational sort, but really a mystic with a great imagination. He points out that this is actually necessary for science. 

 

Scientists are - and have always been - emotional, creative, intuitive, whole human beings, asking questions about a world that was never made to be catalogued and systematized. Whenever I asked what these fungi were doing and designed studies to try and understand their behaviors, I necessarily imagined them.  

 

This theme runs through the book - the idea that we often fail to understand nature because we assume it is like us. We need imagination to find a better metaphor or analogy that for most of that the fungal kingdom does. 

Ironically, one of my favorite life forms in this book isn’t a fungus at all, but a really weird plant. These are the monotropa and other parasitic plants that live entirely off of fungi and the plants (usually conifers) that the fungi live in symbiosis with. One of my formative experiences as a kid was seeing my first sarcodes - snow candle - while camping in the local mountains. It wasn’t until later (and the internet) that I was able to read up on how they worked, but I knew at the time that they had to be parasitic in some way. 

 

This is also the sort of book where a term like “radical mycologist” is thrown around. These sorts, such as Paul Stamets, are brainstorming how we might utilize fungi to undo some of the damage we humans have done to the environment. The whole chapter is fascinating.

 

One note I made was on the experiments that these mycologists have done in “training” fungi to eat things. Apparently, fungi can change their diets and even preferences, if you put them in position to evolve new enzymes. In the one case - pretty gross but useful - a fungus was developed that would eat cigarette butts. And, believe it or not, the mushrooms were an edible oyster type. 

 

Here is another interesting thought. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss considered mead to be the first instance in which humans crossed the line into culture rather than nature. We went from taking what we found, to intentionally cultivating nature to create something to share. (Levi-Strauss believed mead brewing predated agriculture.) Sheldrake points out that by this standard, termites and ants (who both cultivate fungi) crossed that line tens of millions of years before we did. 

 

The final chapter has a number of references to Sheldrake’s hobby as a fermenter, as he calls it. One of his techniques is to attempt to recreate old historical brews based on recipes or descriptions. He also describes the emotions that the different brews seemed to trigger, and his theory that the yeasts (which remain in the brews) are part of that. 

 

I also want to mention a story that involves a distant relative of mine. I think I have mentioned it, but my mother is descended from Josiah Wedgwood, the famous pottery-maker (she actually inherited a very small sum from one of the later Wedgwoods back in the day.) Josiah Wedgwood was a grandfather of Charles Darwin (the other grandfather was Erasmus Darwin.) My family line is from one of the other Wedgwood children - I forget who - so technically Charles Darwin is a first cousin many times removed. 

 

Anyway, the story in this book involves Darwin’s daughter Henrietta (“Etty”.) Apparently, she went on a crusade against the Stinkhorn mushroom, which looks like a penis (hence the Latin name), allegedly because it was, um, obscene. So she would go out in the woods near her home, locating the fungus by smell, and would gather up all the mushrooms, then burn them in secret in the drawing room. The door was locked, lest she corrupt the morals (or is that morels?) of the maids. Sheldrake muses whether this was Etty’s fetish, perhaps. In any case, she undoubtedly helped spread their spores. 

 

Yeah, I found the story quite amusing. 

 

In talking about this somewhat fraught relationship between humans and fungi, Sheldrake also muses about the question of metaphor and imagination he raises at the beginning of the book. The more we learn about fungi, the more we start to see life on Earth as less of a deadly serious competition, and more of a symbiosis. This question as to whether life is best understood as “competition” or “mutual aid” is more than just scientific - it is deeply political. 

 

For most of the twentieth century, discussion of symbiotic interactions remained loaded with political charge. [T]he Cold War prompted biologists to take more seriously the question of coexistence. 

 

These different ways of looking at the world go well beyond science. 

 

The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin pointed out that it is impossible to “do the work of science” without using metaphors, given that almost “the entire body of modern science is an attempt to explain phenomena that cannot be experienced directly by human beings.” Metaphors and analogies, in turn, come laced with human stories and values, meaning that no discussion of scientific ideas - this one included - can be free of cultural bias.

 

This is a good way to look at things. The words we use to describe things cannot be separated from our culture and our ways of thinking. This doesn’t mean that science or truth is “relative” in that sense - quite the contrary. It is our ways of approaching the truth that are mired in our culture. It is those metaphors and analogies that can differ, and challenging those and rethinking those in light of imagination and different ways of thinking can and does lead to better understanding of the underlying reality. (This is desperately needed in our theological thinking too, honestly.) 

 

I think it is worth ending with a lovely quote from St. Francis of Assisi, which Sheldrake uses as the heading for the epilogue. 

 

Our hands imbibe like roots,

So I place them on what is beautiful in the world.