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

by Merlin Sheldrake

To this day, fungi slip around the systems of classification we build for them. The Linnaean system of taxonomy was designed for animals and plants, and doesn’t easily cope with fungi, lichens, or bacteria. A single species of fungus can grow into forms that bear no resemblance to each other whatsoever. Many species have no distinctive characteristics that can be used to define their identity. Advances in gene sequencing make it possible to order fungi into groups that share an evolutionary history, rather than groups based on physical traits. However, deciding where one species starts and another stops based on genetic data presents as many problems as it solves. Within the mycelium of a single fungal “individual” there can exist multiple genomes. Within the DNA extracted from a single pinch of dust, there might be tens of thousands of unique genetic signatures, but no way to assign them to known fungal groups. In 2013, in a paper called “Against the naming of fungi,” the mycologist Nicholas Money went so far as to suggest that the concept of fungal species should be abandoned altogether.