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

by Merlin Sheldrake Narrated by Merlin Sheldrake

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Merlin Sheldrake’s magical mystery tour through the extraordinary world of fungi is simply mind-blowing. Read it and you well never again see the world the same. Science Fiction has nothing on the real thing.

A mind-bending journey into the hidden universe of fungi, "one of those rare books that can truly change the way you see the world around you" (Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk).

"Dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing . . . a remarkable work by a remarkable writer, which succeeds in springing life into strangeness again." (Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland)

When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.

In Entangled Life, the brilliant young biologist Merlin Sheldrake shows us the world from a fungal point of view, providing an exhilarating change of perspective. Sheldrake's vivid exploration takes us from yeast to psychedelics, to the fungi that range for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet, to those that link plants together in complex networks known as the "Wood Wide Web,"  to those that infiltrate and manipulate insect bodies with devastating precision.

Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life's processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works.

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2020 - AudioFile

Author Merlin Sheldrake delivers his love letter to fungi in a smooth British-accented voice. He clearly admires the problem-solving behavior of slime mold and other life-forms without a central brain. Sheldrake explains how the study of fungal networks has applications for transportation systems and the World Wide Web. When he tells how Easter Islanders compared lichen to leprosy when cleaning the famed statues, his emphasis brings home his defense of tiny life forms. Sheldrake also takes a deep dive into his subject, participating in a scientific test of LSD, the famous fungal hallucinogen. At times, his descriptions of life in the "fungal fast lane" can be slow, losing his work’s scientific points in the resulting haze. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

…[an] ebullient and ambitious exploration of a subject that surrounds us yet too few of us think about…Sheldrake's book is full of striking examples…prying open our cramped perspectives…[Entangled Life] may not be a psychedelic…but reading it left me not just moved but altered, eager to disseminate its message of what fungi can do.

Publishers Weekly

03/09/2020

Scientist Sheldrake debuts with a revelatory look at fungi that proves their relevance to humans goes far beyond their uses in cooking. While fungi lack brains, they can process and share complicated information about food and the habitability of environments quickly and over great distances, influencing the “speed and direction of growth,” in ways not yet understood, prompting Sheldrake to ask, “Can we think of their behavior as intelligent?” By discussing how fungi come together with algae to form lichens, Sheldrake touches on another question, that of “where one organism stops and another begins” in symbiotic relationships. Elsewhere, he explains how fungi were essential for the original colonization of land by plants, as they effectively served as roots for the first rootless arrivals. Meanwhile, anthropologists have postulated that, via the fermentation process, fungi may have sparked one of humankind’s key transitions: “from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists.” Looking to the future, Sheldrake discusses developing uses of fungi in shipping, construction, and environmental remediation materials. In bringing all these diverse threads together, Sheldrake delivers a thoroughly enjoyable paean to a wholly different kingdom of life. Agent: Jessica Woollard, David Higham Assoc. (May)

From the Publisher

[An] ebullient and ambitious exploration . . . Reading [Entangled Life] left me not just moved but altered, eager to disseminate its message of what fungi can do.”—The New York Times

“A gorgeous book of literary nature writing, ripe with insight and erudition. . . . Food for the soul.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Nearly every page of this book contained either an observation so interesting or a turn of phrase so lovely that I was moved to slow down, stop, and re-read. . . . [Entangled Life] reminded me that fungi are, like the Universe, sublime.”—Science

“An exuberant introduction to the biology, ecology, climatology, and psychopharmacology of the earth’s ‘metabolic wizards.’”—Harpers Magazine

“A poetic, mind-bending tour of the fungal world.”—Scientific American

“Wondrous . . . Humans should consider fungi among the greatest of earth’s marvels.”—Time (Books of the Year)

“An astonishing book.”—The Observer

“Completely mind-blowing.”—The Sunday Times

“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
 
“I fell in love with this book. Merlin Sheldrake is a scientist with the imagination of a poet and a beautiful writer.”—Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind (Bay Area Book Festival, 2020)

“A magical journey deep into the roots of Nature by an expert storyteller . . . a must-read.”—Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running

“Reading this book, I felt surrounded by a web of wonder. The natural world is more fantastic than any fantasy, so long as you have the means to perceive it. This book provides the means.”—Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget

“Urgent, astounding, and necessary.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

“Dazzling, vibrant, vision changing.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

“Gorgeous.”—Margaret Atwood, author of The Testaments

Library Journal

05/01/2020

Biologist Sheldrake's first book is a fascinating account of how fungi have been an integral component of human existence. From penicillin to truffles to the fermentation process that gives us alcoholic beverages, fungi are ubiquitous. Sheldrake takes readers on journey drawn from his research as a biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute studying the plant voyria, which uses fungal relationships to produce energy. Through chapters on truffle hunting, psychedelics, and the necessary symbiosis between 90 percent of plant species and mycorrhizal fungi, readers will learn how entangled our lives are with fungi. Many now know of the Wood Wide Web, the network of underground mycorrhizal fungi that allow trees to share nutrients and pass information, and Sheldrake devotes a chapter to this amazing discovery as well. While fungi are not all good (think athlete's foot and the fungal disease affecting around 90 species of amphibians), Sheldrake shows us just how vital they are to humankind. VERDICT Sheldrake makes biology both fun and accessible. Fans of Mary Roach and Bill Bryson will appreciate this enthusiastic treatment of the fungi around us.—Diana Hartle, Univ. of Georgia Science Lib., Athens

JUNE 2020 - AudioFile

Author Merlin Sheldrake delivers his love letter to fungi in a smooth British-accented voice. He clearly admires the problem-solving behavior of slime mold and other life-forms without a central brain. Sheldrake explains how the study of fungal networks has applications for transportation systems and the World Wide Web. When he tells how Easter Islanders compared lichen to leprosy when cleaning the famed statues, his emphasis brings home his defense of tiny life forms. Sheldrake also takes a deep dive into his subject, participating in a scientific test of LSD, the famous fungal hallucinogen. At times, his descriptions of life in the "fungal fast lane" can be slow, losing his work’s scientific points in the resulting haze. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2020-03-02
A deep-running mycological inquiry from fungal biologist Sheldrake.

“Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel, and behave,” writes the author in this delightfully granular debut book. “Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.” Fungi are busy everywhere, from the bottom of the sea to the recesses of your nostrils, ranging in size from the microscopic to sprawling networks that are among the largest organisms on Earth. Sheldrake does an excellent job conveying just how essential fungi are to the processes of life—“as regenerators, recyclers, and networkers that stitch worlds together”—despite the fact that so little of their operations is fully understood. Sheldrake shows how fungal lives have made him rethink what he thought he knew about evolution, ecosystems, intelligence, and life. The author engagingly instructs on the symbiotic relationship between fungi and the roots of seed plants. “Today,” he writes, “more than ninety percent of all plant species depend on mycorrhizal fungi,” creating an “intimate partnership…complete with cooperation, conflict, and competition.” Sheldrake also explores the curious lives of truffles and lichen (“A portion of the minerals in your body is likely to have passed through a lichen at some point”), the evolutionary advantages of ingesting psilocybin mushrooms, and the idea that algae made it out of water and onto dry land only with the help of fungi. Certainly one of the most vital and fascinating aspects of fungi has to do with environmental remediation. “Human waste streams are being reimagined in terms of fungal appetites,” writes the author, who notes how mycological solutions have been deployed in the service of corralling oil spills, combating honeybees’ colony collapse disorder, and creating building materials, from sustainable, biodegradable furniture to entire buildings.

From bread to booze to the very fiber of life, the world turns on fungi, and Sheldrake provides a top-notch portrait. (b/w illustrations)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177562582
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	786,285

Read an Excerpt

1.

A Lure

Who’s pimping who?—Prince

A heap of Piedmont white truffles (Tuber magnatum) sat on the scales on a check-­patterned rag. They were scruffy, like unwashed stones; irregular, like potatoes; socketed, like skulls. Two kilograms: €12,000. Their sweet funk filled the room, and in this aroma was their value. It was unabashed and quite unlike anything else: a lure, thick and confusing enough to get lost in.

It was early November, the height of truffle season, and I had traveled to Italy to join two truffle hunters working out of the hills around Bologna. I was lucky. A friend of a friend knew a man who dealt truffles. The dealer had agreed to set me up with his two best hunters, who in turn had consented to let me go out with them. White-­truffle hunters are famously secretive. These fungi have never been domesticated and can only be found in the wild.

Truffles are the underground fruiting bodies of several types of mycorrhizal fungi. For most of the year, truffle fungi exist as mycelial networks, sustained in part by the nutrients they obtain from the soil and also by the sugars they draw from plant roots. However, their subterranean habitat confronts them with a basic problem. Truffles are spore-producing organs, analogous to the seed-­producing fruit of a plant. Spores evolved to allow fungi to disperse themselves, but underground their spores can’t be caught by air currents and are invisible to the eyes of animals.

Their solution is to smell. But to smell above the olfactory racket of a forest is no small task. Forests are crisscrossed with smells, each a potential fascination or distraction to an animal nose. Truffles must be pungent enough for their scent to penetrate the layers of soil and enter the air, distinctive enough for an animal to take note amid the ambient smellscape, and delicious enough for that animal to seek it out, dig it up, and eat it. Every visual disadvantage that truffles face—being entombed in the soil, difficult to spot once unearthed, and visually unappealing once spotted—they make up for with smell.

Once eaten, a truffle’s job is done: An animal has been lured into exploring the soil and recruited to carry the fungus’s spores off to a new place and deposit them in its feces. A truffle’s allure is thus the outcome of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary entanglement with animal tastes. Natural selection will favor truffle fungi that match the preferences of their finest spore dispersers. Truffles with better “chemistry” will attract animals more successfully than those with worse. Like the orchids that mimic the appearance of sexually receptive female bees, truffles provide a depiction of animal tastes—an evolutionary portrait in scent of animal fascination.

I was in Italy because I wanted to be drawn underground by a fungus into the chemical world in which it lived. We are ill-­equipped to participate in the chemical lives of fungi, but ripe truffles speak a language so piercing and simple that even we can understand it. In doing so, these fungi include us for a moment within their chemical ecology. How should we think about the torrents of interaction that occur between organisms underground? How should we understand these spheres of more-­than-­human communication? Perhaps running after a dog hot on the trail of a truffle and burying my face in the soil was as close as I could get to the chemical tug and promise that fungi use to conduct so many aspects of their lives.

The human sense of smell is extraordinary. Our eyes can distinguish several million colors, our ears can distinguish half a million tones, but our noses can distinguish well over a trillion different odors. Humans can detect virtually all volatile chemicals ever tested. We outperform rodents and dogs in detecting certain odors, and we can follow scent trails. Smells feature in our choice of sexual partners and in our ability to detect fear, anxiety, or aggression in others. And smell is woven into the fabric of our memories; it is common for people suffering from post-­traumatic stress disorder to have olfactory flashbacks.

Noses are finely tuned instruments. Your olfactory sense can split complex mixtures into their constituent chemicals, just as a prism can split white light into its constituent colors. To do this, it must detect the precise arrangement of atoms within a molecule. Mustard smells mustardy because of bonds between nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur. Fish smells fishy because of bonds between nitrogen and hydrogen. Bonds between carbon and nitrogen smell metallic and oily.

The ability to detect and respond to chemicals is a primordial sensory ability. Most organisms use their chemical senses to explore and make sense of their environment. Plants, fungi, and animals all use similar types of receptors to detect chemicals. When molecules bind to these receptors, they trigger a signaling cascade: One molecule triggers a cellular change, which triggers a bigger change, and so on. In this way, small causes can ripple into large effects: Human noses can detect some compounds at as low a concentration as thirty-­four thousand molecules in one square centimeter, the equivalent of a single drop of water in twenty thousand Olympic swimming pools.

For an animal to experience a smell, a molecule must land on their olfactory epithelium. In humans, this is a membrane up and behind the nose. The molecule binds to a receptor, and nerves fire. The brain gets involved as chemicals are identified or trigger thoughts and emotional responses. Fungi are equipped with different kinds of bodies. They don’t have noses or brains. Instead, their entire surface behaves like an olfactory epithelium. A mycelial network is one large chemically sensitive membrane: A molecule can bind to a receptor anywhere on its surface and trigger a signaling cascade that alters fungal behavior.

Fungi live their lives bathed in a rich field of chemical information. Truffle fungi use chemicals to communicate to animals their readiness to be eaten; they also use chemicals to communicate with plants, animals, other fungi—and themselves. It isn’t possible to understand fungi without exploring these sensory worlds, but they are hard for us to interpret. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Like fungi, we spend much of our lives being drawn toward things. We know what it is to be attracted or repelled. Through smell, we can participate in the molecular discourse fungi use to organize much of their existence.

In human history, truffles have long been associated with sex. The word for truffle in many languages translates to “testicle,” as in the old Castilian turmas de tierra, or earth’s testicles. Truffle fungi have evolved to make animals giddy because their lives depend on it. As I spoke with Charles Lefevre, a truffle scientist and cultivator in Oregon, about his work with the Périgord black truffle, he broke off: “Funny—as I’m saying this I am ‘bathing’ in the virtual aroma of Tuber melanosporum. It’s as if a cloud of it is filling my office, but there are currently no truffles here. These olfactory flashbacks are common with truffles in my experience. They can even include visual and emotional memories.”

In France, Saint Anthony—the patron saint of lost objects—is regarded as the patron saint of truffles, and truffle masses are celebrated in his honor. Prayers do little to stop the skulduggery. Cheap truffles are stained or flavored to pass them off as their more valuable cousins. Prized truffle forests are targeted by truffle poachers. Expertly trained dogs worth thousands of euros are stolen. Poisoned meat is strewn around woods to kill the dogs of rival hunters. In 2010, in a crime of passion, a French truffle farmer, Laurent Rambaud, shot dead a truffle thief he encountered while patrolling his truffle orchards during the night. Following his arrest, two hundred and fifty supporters marched in support of Rambaud’s right to defend his crop, angry at the rise in thefts of both truffles and truffle dogs. The deputy head of the Tricastin truffle growers’ union told La Provence newspaper that he had advised fellow producers never to patrol their fields with a gun because “the temptation is too high.” Lefevre put it well: “Truffles bring out the dark side of people. It’s like money lying on the ground, but it’s perishable and mercurial.”

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