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

by Merlin Sheldrake

Evidence is usually sparse, and what fragments there are can often be mobilized to support different points of view.

The book of Isaiah in the Old Testament has it that “all flesh is grass.” It is a logic that we might today describe as ecological:

that is not what Isaiah means!

According to some evolutionary psychologists, humans’ large brains and flexible intellects arose to allow us to navigate our way through complex

social situations.

But those complex situations would only be complex if they involved others with already large brains, so where did the first large brain come from?

IN ALL PHYSICAL systems, energy moves “downhill,” from where there is more to where there

is less.

This is plant-centrism in action.

Writing the fungus into the story encourages us to adopt a more fungal point of view.

I’d really love to get past the language and try to understand the phenomenon.”

Macrotermes had been cultivating fungi for more than twenty million years by the time the genus Homo evolved.

Have they been stagnant since then?

with the idea. He was daydreaming. All of a sudden, separate lines of thought came together and hit him “like a lightning bolt.”

and I delighted in being able to taste the difference between yeasts gathered from apple skins or collected in plates of

sugar water placed overnight on shelves in old libraries.

a scandal of art, no botanist knowing what is a Species and what is a Variety.”

fundamentally competitive or cooperative?

Cooperative initially but cursed by sin

and it mirrored views of human social progress within an

industrial capitalist system.

It is well-established in the sciences that metaphors can help

to generate new ways of thinking. The biochemist Joseph Needham described a working analogy as a “net of coordinates” that could be used to arrange an otherwise

formless mass of inf...

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.”

Why would the ability to metabolize alcohol arise so many millions of years before humans developed technologies of fermentation?

In this view, humans are tempted by alcohol because our primate ancestors were.

Infinite regress

Vast government subsidies are required;

to make decisions under the influence of it,