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

by Merlin Sheldrake

Some – including the commonly cultivated oyster mushroom, Pleurotus ostreatus – produce hyphal stalks capped with a single toxic droplet that paralyses nematodes, giving the hypha enough time to grow through their mouth and digest the worm from the inside.

How to Change Your Mind,

In all physical systems, energy moves ‘downhill’, from where there is more to where there is less. Heat travels from the hot sun into cold space. A truffle’s scent drifts from areas of high concentration to lower concentration. Neither has to be actively transported. As long as there is an energetic slope, energy will move from the ‘source’ (at the top) to the ‘sink’ (at the bottom). What matters most is how steep the slope is between the two.

The ADH4 mutation provides support for the ‘drunken monkey hypothesis’, proposed by the biologist Robert Dudley to explain the origins of humans’ fondness for alcohol. In this view, humans are tempted by alcohol because our primate ancestors were. The scent of alcohol produced by yeasts was a reliable way to find ripe fruit as it rotted on the ground. Both our human attraction to alcohol, and the entire ecology of gods and goddesses that oversee fermentation and intoxication, are remnants of a much more ancient fascination.