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Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

Merlin Sheldrake

Start date: February 1, 2021

Finish date: February 28, 2021

Discussion: Book Club 2021

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Sep 11, 2020 Charlene rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biology, chaos-complexity-emergence, ecology, medicine, evolution, networks

I remember reading Ed Yong's I contain multitudes and, even though I had already read so much about the role of microbes in the human body, I was captivated and steeped in a world of tiny microbes that came alive to me and helped me see things in a whole new way. I had a similar experience when reading this book.

Fungi are inside of you and all around you. They eat rock and turn it into the soil in which plants grow and provide the nutrients for animal life. They ingest pollutants and help the e I remember reading Ed Yong's I contain multitudes and, even though I had already read so much about the role of microbes in the human body, I was captivated and steeped in a world of tiny microbes that came alive to me and helped me see things in a whole new way. I had a similar experience when reading this book.

Fungi are inside of you and all around you. They eat rock and turn it into the soil in which plants grow and provide the nutrients for animal life. They ingest pollutants and help the earth maintain its lively surface, much like plants that take in carbon do. Fungi made it possible for plants to make the transition from water to land and continue to evolve by creating root systems until plants could make their own. Even then, fungi have been an essential component of root systems. More than 90% of plants today depend on fungi to remain alive. In fact, fungi helped give rise to all life on Earth by being the first species to establish themselves in the soil so that plants grow and sustain animal growth, and altogether build an ecosystem. It is the fungal tissue that holds the soil together, so that it does not wash away. I loved visualizing the fungal tissue. How amazing.

Fungi have some serious staying power. They can survive in extreme environments from the frozen tundra to dry deserts. They can certainly do damage, but they also have special healing powers. Fungi nestle themselves between the cells in plant leaves and stems to seal and protect plants against disease. No plant grown in natural conditions would exist without the aid of fungi. Indeed, they are as much a part of the plant as the roots and leaves.

The reason why fungi can live in such diverse and extreme environments is because they are highly adaptive. IMO, this was probably the best part of the book. Sheldrake boiled down adaptability to how an organism metabolizes. That is it. You are not going to be fit enough to produce offspring if you can't intake enough energy to do so. Whatever adaptations the species makes to be able to take in enough nutrients, are going to be the best adaptations. Think about the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. Now picture humans adapting to a situation like that by creating descendants that could eat whole new materials that we never thought of as food. Fungi are the ultimate metabolizers. They can ingest crude oil, plastic, rocks, and even nuclear waste. Just as plants use the energy they gain from ingesting sunlight, fungi are able to use energy from radioactive materials. To think that any species alive could not only survive when ingesting radioactive materials, but could thrive, is just incredible.

Sheldrake provided an overview of what fungi are. Most, but not all, are mushrooms. Their goal is to disperse spores as widely around the globe as possible. Some fungi expel their spores explosively, 10 times faster than a space shuttle directly after launch. Fungi produce 50 megatons of spores each year. That is equivalent to the weight of 500,000 blue whales, making spores the greatest source of living particles in the air.

Spores are found in clouds and can influence the weather by triggering the formation of water droplets that fall down as rain or snow. Fungi make intricate (and beautiful!!!) networks, made of mycelium, that carry water through ecosystems. The mycelium in some fungal species is electrically excitable and conducts waves of electrical activity along hyphae, analogous to the electrical impulses of animal nerve cells.

If you like reading about leaf cutter ants, and who doesn't, you will love Sheldrake's focus on how important fungi is to the ants' network. Fungi are interwoven all around their cities, providing both structure and food for the colony. Termites similarly depend on fungi.

Fungi are terrifically destructive, capable of creating billions of dollars worth of damage or creating famine. They can ruin enough rice that would have fed 60 million people. But just try to get rid of them. If you kill fungus, you will probably kill the very plant you are trying to save. Just as they can harm humans, they can save humans. Fungi gave rise to the wonder drug penicillin, which changed the face of medicine. Medicines are developed that mimic mechanisms in fungi, which have achieved many positive outcomes, such as creating drugs that make organ transplants possible because it stops the body from rejecting the new, life saving organ. Fungi derived drugs help fight cancer, depression, anxiety, and viruses. Fungi can be used to filter dangerous water, purifying it. Fungi are being used to replace plastic building materials. And, since they can eat crude oil and radioactive substances, they can be used to help clean the environment.

Considering all the above, it's no surprise that Merlin Sheldrake asks his reader to consider if humans really are the most intelligent species on Earth or perhaps fungi might be as good or better architects, medical doctors, therapists, farmers, etc than we humans. (Sheldrake included a brilliant and amusing experiment that involved fungi shopping at Ikea. definitely worth reading).

Sheldrake also went into detail about the role of fungi in and on the human body-- where it likes to live, what it likes to control (including human behavior).

Really delightful read. Through the entire first half of the book, I was in a constant state of awe. This is a book that I will probably read again. ...more

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Mar 09, 2021 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, academic-notations, literary, science

'Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures' by Merlin Sheldrake is fascinating. He explains in unexpectedly poetic language what is known about the variety of fungi from observations and experiments.

I had no idea fungi came in so many forms - from the microscopic living inside of cells to the visible residing in forests and oceans. We see them primarily when fruiting as mushrooms or truffles, or when growing stalks out of insects they have infected. But the ...more

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Feb 16, 2024 Eric Bingham rated it liked it

2.5 stars really. This book felt like it waffled between amazing information about the world of fungi and boring monotony of details about things that seemed less interesting to me. I really enjoyed some of the chapters. Other chapters I endured. It didn't help that I did the audiobook version and the authors voice always sounded so bored that even the truly interesting content sometimes felt unexciting. ...more

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Jan 17, 2022 Barbok rated it really liked it

Shelves: science, non-fiction, science-nature, mycology

This is an interesting book when the author sticks to exploring the science of fungi. The author rambles and veers off in a different direction a little often, as in a later chapter almost entirely devoted to the correct metaphors & analogies for fungi. (Thanks, but I'd rather have more science. An entire book on fungi & environmental remediation would be cool.) Still, there's good stuff here. 3-1/2 stars rounded up, just cause. ...more

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