Entangled Life
Merlin Sheldrake, WOW. Just wow. This book expanded my concept of so much more than just fungi. I was questioning sticky concepts and common categorizations and my identity and my symbiont relationships with microbes. Here is yet another book pushing me towards novel ways of looking at spirituality, universal consciousness, panpsychism, etc. and getting me SO excited for learning and life.
Some of my favorite quotes:
“A given mycelial network might have anywhere between hundreds and billions of hyphal tips, all integrating and processing information on a massively parallel basis… How are mycelial networks able to communicate with themselves? How does information travel across mycelial networks so quickly?… if fungi did use waves of electrical activity to transmit signals around a network, wouldn’t we think of mycelium as at least a brain-like phenomenon? … Are network-based life-forms like fungi or slime molds capable of a form of cognition? Can we think of their behavior as intelligent? If other organisms’ intelligence didn’t look like ours, then how might it appear? Would we even notice it?” - Living Labyrinths
“Every link in a wood wide web is a fungus with a life of its own… One of the most surprising properties of wood wide webs is the way they enfold organisms other than plants… Some bacteria make their lives within fungal hyphae themselves, and enhance fungal growth, stimulate their metabolisms, produce key vitamins, and even influence fungal relationships with their plant partners.” - Wood Wide Webs
“If information can pass through fungal networks linking small bean plants in pots in a greenhouse, what’s going on in natural ecosystems?…without knowing how information passes between plants, it’s impossible to know whether donor plants actively “send” a warning message, or whether receiver plants simply eavesdrop on their neighbor’s stress… Are we able to let shared mycorrhizal networks be questions, rather than answers known in advance?… Are we able to stand back, look at the system, and let polyphonic swarms of plants and fungi and bacteria that make up our homes and our world be themselves, and quite unlike anything else?” - Wood Wide Webs
“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 can be free of cultural bias.” - Making Sense of Fungi
“The first is a growing awareness of the many sophisticated, problem-solving behaviors that have evolved in brainless organisms outside the animal kingdom… they can "make decisions" by comparing a range of possible courses of action and can find the shortest path between two points in a labyrinth.” - What Is it Like to Be a Fungus?