#entangled life

[shamebats]

[nitewrighter]

This is one of those paragraphs where like, I know it's supposed to be horny--I know it is. Sheldrake spends noticeable parts of the book talking about the erotic elements of truffles and the transformative promiscuity of mycelial networks and lichen.

But it's also like "Hey chat am I crazy or is this horny?" when a grown man is crawling on the ground, delicately tracing fine laceworks with his fingers, and sticking his face into damp spongy crevices and taking a long sniff.

[godzilla-reads]

Science isn’t an exercise in cold-blooded rationality. Scientists are—and have always been—emotional, creative, intuitive, whole human beings, asking questions about a world that was never made to be catalogued and systematized.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life

[the-bramble--patch]

"I had a professor called Oliver Rackham, an ecologist and historian, who studied the ways that ecosystems have shaped--and been shaped by--human cultures for thousands of years. He took us to nearby forests and told us about the history of these places and their human inhabitants by reading the twists and splits in the branches of old oak trees, by observing where nettles thrived, by noting which plants did or didn't grow in a hedgerow. Under Rackham's influence, the clean line I had imagined dividing nature and culture started to blur."

-Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life

[binxbartholomewbones]

From death, life.

[earhartsplane]

As it happens, I've been binging Pluribus for the last two days AND listening to Entangled Life. So now I am obsessed with the idea that everything the Hive mind does could be considered an extended phenotype of the virus, just like the behavior of Cordyceps-infected ants can be considered an extended phenotype of the fungus.

I think every behavior of the Hive can be explained in-universe by the idea that it helps propagate the virus. The biological imperative to integrate everyone allows it to pull resources. The pleasurable nature of the Hive makes it want to spread the signal. Even the no-harm principle applied to every form of life can be a sort of failsafe: although it seems that only humans can be integrated, there is no certainty that it will always be the case. The virus could end up on a planet with several intelligent life-forms, or it could learn to integrate other life-forms on Earth.

I have no proof of this, nor do I think it will necessarily be addressed, but I am certain that Kepler-22b is not the origin of the virus, just one in a long line of planets that have been infected.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2025: ENTANGLED LIFE by Merlin Sheldrake.

So! I love fungi, evidenced by my 'shrooms mug and bookmark (courtesy of @layaart!). I Just Think They're Neat™. I also have a biology background, so I went into this book super stoked for Fungal Insights and New Knowledge.

Un/fortunately: Big chunks of this wound up being Meditations Upon Mushrooms: The Personal Reflections Edition. There were way more personal anecdotes divorced from studies than I expected, and a lot of it (especially at the front) rubbed me the wrong way. Like, gee, I'm glad you got to go on a very expensive truffle hunting expedition, and good for you enjoying your Clinical Shrooms Experiences, but like. can we get back to the science about it, please, not all of us have the same connections (ahahaha) or money as you do.

Some of his ideas were cool! He's clearly thought a lot about fungi and how they work in our world, and how we relate to them working in our world, and how we can maybe do that differently for different insights--Meditations Upon Mushrooms is not entirely derogatory, above. I liked the discussions of where all things mycelial might be heading, technology-wise and fabrications-wise, and I thought the fungal frame on "wood wide web" was really interesting. And this book has extensive notes and bibliography sections (literally NINETY-SIX PAGES, combined, plus an index after), so: good material to mine through.

But, unfortunately, after reading I feel like I do need to mine through those sources, because I didn't get the impression that Sheldrake engaged rigorously with most of them, or at least not in the level of detail I'd been hoping for. This is definitely a Big Ideas Book, and a More Questions Than Answers Book, which are both fine! we love books like that! it's just not what I was hoping for :/ It's a good start with interesting ideas, but when the jacket copy promises me an "exploration," I'm expecting something a little more cohesive than the collection of borderline-tangents that I got. Reads like a mushroom trip, in a manic, disparate sort of way.

Mixed bag. Come for the fascinating ideas, but bring a shovel to excavate the bib on your own, I guess.

[morellish]

i am pretty sure i identified this as hygrocybe miniata, i love little colourful mushrooms.