Uncertainty is healthy

<p><a href="https://www.merlinsheldrake.com/entangled-life"><em>Entangled Life</em></a> by Merlin Sheldrake is a fantastic book all about mushrooms and fungi but what made it a breezy read for me was how <em>weird</em> they are. It’s like Merlin got his hands on creatures from another dimension where the rules of biology simply don’t apply.</p> <p>First: Merlin goes into great depth about genes and how they don’t have to be passed on from parent to child. Some organisms can inherit traits <em>horizontally</em>, or from creature to creature. Imagine if you bumped into Hans Zimmer and now you can play the piano. Weird!</p> <p>Second: Merlin has a whole chapter about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen">lichens</a> which messed me up. Lichens are odd because they’re symbiotes, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiote(comics)">Venom-style</a>, and have a curious relationship with fungi. In fact, the closer you look at them the harder it is to see individual creatures. When you look closely at “a” lichen you see ten thousand other organisms as if you were looking at a city, a collective, a thing of multiple organisms that we just pretend is an individual because that’s how we see ourselves. In fact, when looking at mushrooms, thinking about the world in this way — of separate individuals — doesn’t make much sense at all.</p> <p>All of this is gloriously sci-fi, as Merlin writes:</p> <blockquote> <p>To talk about individuals made no sense anymore. Biology—the study of living organisms—had transformed into ecology—the study of the relationships between living organisms.</p> </blockquote> <p>This reminds me of James Burke’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections(BritishTVseries)"><em>Connections</em></a> where he argues that what we think of as separate disciplines — like farming and math or subjects like biology and web design — aren’t separate things. Every discipline is a big soupy mess that gets blurrier and blurrier the closer you look at them.</p> <p>In the same way, mushrooms and fungi don’t care about conforming to our world of individual identities:</p> <blockquote> <p>The study of relationships can be confusing. Almost all are ambiguous. Have leaf-cutter ants domesticated the fungus that they depend on, or has the fungus domesticated the ants? Do plants farm the mycorrhizal fungi that they live with, or do the fungi farm the plants? Which way does the arrow point? This uncertainty is healthy.</p> </blockquote> <p>I love this, of course. It feels optimistic, hopeful, sci-fi, and Star-Trek-as-hell, to see ourselves as part of a collective instead of individuals. To see that collaboration is <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/strategic-and-necessary/">strategic and necessary</a>.</p>