A book about fungi

I’ve just started reading Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds & Shape our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.

I can tell I’m in for a good read. Just in the introduction there’s this tidbit:

[There] is a growing awareness of the many sophisticated, problem-solving behaviors that have evolved in brainless organisms outside the animal kingdom. The best-known examples are slime molds, such as Physarum polycephalum (though they are amoeba, not fungi, as true molds are). As we’ll see, slime molds have no monopoly on brainless problem-solving, but they are easy to study and have become poster organisms that have opened up new avenues of research. Physarum form exploratory networks made of tentacle-like veins and have no central nervous system nor anything that resembles one. Yet they can “make decisions” by comparing a range of possible courses of action and can find the shortest path between two points in a labyrinth. Japanese researchers released slime molds into petri dishes modeled on the Greater Tokyo area. Oat flakes marked major urban hubs and bright lights represented obstacles such as mountains slime molds don’t like light. After a day, the slime mold had found the most efficient route between the oats, emanating into a network almost identical to Tokyo’s existing rail network. In similar experiments, slime molds have re-created the motorway network of the United States and the network of Roman roads in central Europe. A slime-mold enthusiast told me about a test he had performed. He frequently got lost in IKEA stores and would spend many minutes trying to find the exit. He decided to challenge his slime molds with the same problem and built a maze based on the floor plan of his local IKEA. Sure enough, without any signs or staff to direct them, the slime molds soon found the shortest path to the exit. “You see,” he said with a laugh, “they’re cleverer than me.”

Whether one calls slime molds, fungi, and plants “intelligent” depends on one’s point of view. Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us or have brains they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to “solve problems,” “communicate”, “make decisions”, “learn”, and “remember”. As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change.

This comes back to my recent theme of dismantling the Platonic and Aristotelian classification of the world. Creatures without brains possess intelligence and problem-solving abilities — this could also make materialists uncomfortable. Also the line of what’s a species isn’t all that clear. Humans have more non-human cells inside them, plants have even stronger cross-over with various fungi. In short, the living world is far closer a single interconnected whole than separate individuals.