When I published a short post about fungi last month, a friend suggested I should read a book called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures, by a chap called Merlin Sheldrake. So I did. Thanks!
I now know a lot more about fungi than I used to. For instance, I know that some of the earliest multicellular life-forms on earth were lichens, symbiotic partnerships between fungi and algae. But these fungi don't just team up with a particular type of algae, they will team up with any type that will give them what they need. Nor are lichens simple combinations of two species, as scientists thought for a long time. They also involve bacteria and other single celled organisms. Fungi, it turns out, will team up with whatever organism they can find that will help them survive.
This of course, includes trees and plants, which almost invariably rely on soil fungi to extract minerals from the soil and help them absorb water. And it also includes us. Fungi help the sperm find the egg in the uterus, they help the cells grow and diversify, they help us digest our food, they help carry signals between our neurons. If there were no fungi, there would be no us. Not only that, but we put a lot of effort into cultivating fungi. Of course we grow mushrooms to eat. We also use yeast both to ferment our favourite drinks and to bake our bread. Without fungi the wheat would not have grown in the first place. Fungi are used to induce ecstasy, to enhance creativity, to aid meditation and to ease social situations. Even Christians drink fermented grape juice in our most sacred ritual.
In our era of ecological crisis, many people are looking to fungi to save us. Back in the 1970s young radicals hit on the cultivation of psychedelic mushrooms as a way of altering and heightening our consciousness. Fifty years later these now ageing radicals and their successors have branched out into all sorts of directions. You can build packaging and building materials out of fungus, replacing plastic packaging, bricks and cladding. Fungi will eat practically anything and so can be used to destroy even the most toxic wastes. People are experimenting with fungi that can eat plastic, devour oil spills, turn sewage into clean water. The book even features a photo of a common mushroom trained to live exclusively on a diet of used cigarette butts.
Of course being humans we think the world revolves around us and that we are making use of fungi to help us survive and thrive. Sheldrake returns again and again to the question: what if the fungus is really using us? We benefit from fungi in many ways, but they also benefit from us.
Take the example of the African Macrotermes termite which, like some species of Australian termites, builds huge above-ground mud nests. Macrotermes live on wood but have no means of digesting it. Instead, they cultivate Termitomyces fungus, building huge temperature-controlled mounds which are perfect places for this fungus to grow. The termites forage for scraps of wood which they bring back to the nest, chew up and feed to the fungus. The fungus breaks it down, extracting nutrients and leaving behind a sludge of partly-decomposed wood which the termites then eat. You could say that the termites cultivate the fungus and use it to process their food for them. On the other hand, you could say that the fungi have domesticated termites and set them to work building their homes and collecting their food.
So then think about us. Without fungi we would starve to death just as quickly as a nest of Macrotermes and for the same reason - we need fungi to help us digest our food. Have fungi domesticated us in order to provide them with a warm, moist place to live and food to eat? After all, fungi existed for billions of years before we arrived on the scene. We perform so many services for fungi. We build compost heaps for them to forage in. We transport their spores from place to place, even flying them around the world, so that they will have new environments to grow in. We create vats and liquid solutions for them to live and feed in. We introduce them to new foods - used cigarette butts may not seem that appetising to us, but who knows what a fungus thinks?
Do fungi think? Just as with trees, the question seems silly at first. Of course fungi are not intelligent, you say, they're just replicating cells, they have no brains. This is true. Whereas humans have big collections of neurons in our heads which we use for thinking, fungi have so such cells and certainly no such nodes of cells. Ergo, we are clearly smarter.
It reminds me of that lovely quote from one of Douglas Adam's 'Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy' books.
Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
Of course we think we are more intelligent than everything else, because we judge everything else by our own standards. To a large extent when we measure non-human intelligence we are measuring how much like us other creatures are. If fungi are intelligent, their intelligence will be as different from ours as their bodies are. Perhaps it is impossible for us to make sense of their form of intelligence, but we should also consider that they may consider us stupid in the extreme. What other creature would be so foolish as to destroy the very ecosystem that it relies on for its survival? No self-respecting fungus would do such a thing.
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