Entangled Life I
In many ways, biology is the newest science. Not that in the Western tradition, some aspects of biological thought haven't been around since the Greeks. After all, Aristotle had a great deal to say on the designs of life. But the history of life, the knowledge no organism stands alone, that a species is only defined in relation to its greater environment, have only been fitfully understood for not much more than a century. Ecology, an essential biological concept was only developed by the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel at the end of the 19th century.
In the last couple decades, good biology books started to appear more frequently. At the very top of this list is 2020's Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake, an amazingly thought provoking look at fungi, a life form still little studied or understood, yet all knowledge we gain challenges our established thinking on life, its organization, connections, and functions. Understanding fungi, offers us a greater understanding of ecology, “The study of the relationships between organisms and their environments: both the places where they live and the thicket of relationships that sustain them. Inspired by the work of Alexander von Humboldt, the study of ecology emerged from the idea that nature is an interconnected whole, 'a system of active forces.' Organisms could not be understood in isolation.”
Everyone has experienced a fungus. Beer and bread come from our cultivation of yeast fungi. We may have also experienced various fungi causing bodily infections or plant debilitation. Everyone's encountered molds and mildews. Mushrooms and truffles are fungal fruit, considered dietary staples and delicacies across the planet. Fungi range in size from single celled yeast to honey fungi, among the largest organisms on the planet. In Oregon, one honey fungus specimen weighs eight hundred tons, spread across six square miles. It is thought to be somewhere between two to eight thousand years old!
In traditional and maybe increasingly archaic biological taxonomy, fungi are their own kingdom, alongside bacteria, plants, and animals. At a foundational organizational level and quite contradictory from appearance, fungi are closer to animals than plants. In the history of life, fungi developed before both plants and animals. It is thought photosynthesizing algae, first moving to land 600 million years ago, partnered with fungi to get necessary minerals and water from the soil, out of this relationship evolved plants. There's believed to be two to three million fungal species living both on land and sea, more fungi species than plants and animals combined.
Entangled Life is marvelously thought provoking. The more we understand about fungi, the more a great deal of our established thought about how life operates is challenged and upended. I'll break down some of the book's ideas into two, though adopting some fungal understanding, by no means exclusive parts.
First, this piece looks at fungal interactions with their environment and the radical reshaping of established biological thought this entails. Second, a look at the structural organization and processes of the fungal organisms themselves, provoking thought on how homo sapiens organizes both socially and in relation to our greater environment.
The most revolutionary change induced by understanding fungi is the concept of symbiosis, developed by 19th century German botanist Albert Frank's study of lichens. Anyone who has traveled across mountains, through deserts, or walked passed old stone walls is familiar with lichen, the brilliant, multicolored geometric patterns covering rocks. When first encountered, it's difficult to believe lichens are a life form. Yet, they are essential actors in breaking down those very mountains, boulders, and rocks into the soil necessary for plants to grow.
Lichens are fungi, but more importantly, they are fungi partnering with algae and bacteria. By destructing the rocks, fungi provide the minerals and water for the photosynthetic algae and or bacteria, which in return provide sun produced energy in the form of sugars to the fungi. Frank created the term symbiosis to describe this partnership. “The biologist Heinrich Anton de Bary adopted Frank's term and generalized it to refer to the full type of interactions between any type of organism, stretching from parasitism at one pole, to mutually beneficial relationships at the other.”
Sheldrake writes,
“Lichens were a gateway organism to the idea of symbiosis, an idea that ran against the prevailing currents in evolutionary thought in the late-nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, best summed up in Thomas Henry Huxley's portrayal of life as a 'gladiator's show...whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.' In the wake of the dual hypothesis, evolution could no longer be thought of solely in terms of competition and conflict. Lichens had become a type case of inter-kingdom collaboration.”
Symbiosis runs counter to evolutionary thinking of not just a century ago, but still most established thinking on evolution today. Symbiosis has yet to be greatly incorporated into evolutionary thinking. Not that the idea of symbiosis is in anyway inconsistent with Darwin's essential insight, which was not about the individual's struggle for existence. Darwin's “natural selection” is about species', not individual's design being determined by its greater environment. Symbiosis is a process of natural selection.