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

by Merlin Sheldrake

While I crouched for weeks scraping mud into small tubes, toucans croaked, howler monkeys roared, lianas tangled, and anteaters licked. Microbial lives, especially those buried in soil, were not accessible like the bristling charismatic aboveground world of the large. Really, to make my findings vivid, to allow them to build and contribute to a general understanding, imagination was required. There was no way around it. In scientific circles imagination usually goes by the name of speculation and is treated with some suspicion; in publications it is usually served up with a mandatory health warning. Part of writing up research is scrubbing it clean of the flights of fancy, idle play, and the thousand trials and errors that give rise to even the smallest of findings. Not everyone who reads a study wants to push their way through the fuss. Besides, scientists have to appear credible. Sneak backstage and one might not find people at their most presentable. Even backstage, in the most nocturnal musings I shared with colleagues, it was unusual to get into the details of how we had imagined—accidentally or deliberately—the organisms we studied, whether fish, bromeliad, liana, fungus, or bacterium. There was something embarrassing about admitting that the tangle of our unfounded conjectures, fantasies, and metaphors might have helped shape our research. Regardless, imagination forms part of the everyday business of inquiring. Science isn’t an exercise in cold-blooded rationality....