CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

A massively diverse group of organisms, fungi support and sustain nearly all living systems. Fungi throw our concepts of individuality, and even intelligence, into question. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disasters. By examining fungi on their own terms, we are changing our understanding of how life works.  

In this episode, Merlin Sheldrake, biologist and author of the bestselling book Entangled Life, is joined by CIIS professor of Ecology and Religion Elizabeth Allison for an illuminating conversation about the ways these extraordinary organisms, and our relationships with them, change our understanding of the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel, and behave.   

This episode was recorded during a live online event on May 5th, 2023. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available here. To find out more about CIIS and public programs just like this one, visit our website and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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Elizabeth Allison: Hi Merlin. It's such a pleasure to talk with you today. I first read this book in the dark days of the pandemic back in 2020 when it first came out. And everyone here in San Francisco was baking sourdough bread. And I just realized when I reread this book that our little fungi friends were helping us through the pandemic. But as you point out in the book, there's such a variety in fungi, from some of the largest organisms to some of the smallest. So first of all, what are fungi?  

Merlin Sheldrake: Well thanks for having me. It's great to be here. It's great to be chatting. And thanks to anyone who's taken the time to be here today with us. Fungi are a kingdom of life. So that's as big as broad and busy a category as animals or plants. There's lots of ways to be a fungus. They are a kingdom of life that has not had a kingdom's worth of attention. I think that's important, and I think that's a theme that will keep running through our conversation.  

But what fungi are, are organisms that, like animals, have to find food in the world and digest it. So not like plants which can photosynthesize. So, fungi can't make their own energy from sunlight and carbon dioxide. So, they have to find food in the world. They have to digest that food. But they tend not to be like animals which locomote, can move around a lot of the time. And fungi are more like plants in the sense that they tend to grow around rather than move around.  

Most fungi live their lives not as mushrooms, but as mycelial networks which are branching, fusing networks of tubular cells. So, when we, a lot of our conversation about fungi, when we say the word fungi, what we're really talking about is a network organism, a network of tubes that's constantly remodeling itself. And that's a good image to have in mind, if it's possible to have that kind of an image in mind as we go about our conversations.  

Elizabeth: Great. Thank you. And yeah, that network idea is so fascinating to me. In the subtitle of your book, you talk about how fungi make our worlds and shape our minds. And it seems throughout the book that fungi really challenge our categories. And so, you're saying they're seeking out food, but they don't really move around like animals. And I feel like the common conception though is that they're more like plants because they just stay in one place. But they're in, and then you just said, they're another category, another kingdom. So how do fungi sort of disrupt our categories, our standard categories that we think about? 

Merlin: Thanks for that question. I always feel that thinking about fungi makes the world look different. And one of the reasons is that they confuse many of our categories. Some of these categories are things that we use every day. We live in societies which take them for granted, which indeed are built on these categories like individuality, autonomy, independence. We're so used to in modern post-industrial human cultures thinking about neatly bounded individuals. And we have to have neatly bounded individuals in order to get a passport, in order to fill out a tax return, in order to be identifiable citizen in society.  

But when you look at the living world, it becomes clear that individuality is not so much a natural fact but more a category that depends on your point of view. Fungi make questions of individuality in so many ways. They're networks, they're branching, fusing networks, these mycelial networks. You could take a fragment of a network and it could turn into an entirely new organism. It'd be a bit like taking a bit of your hair or a tiny fragment of your skin and growing a whole new you. You could then take that new fungus and introduce it to the parent fungus or that wouldn't strictly be a parent because it's not a new generation. And those two networks would fuse with each other fine and just become a new functional individual.  

So, this is the kind of behavior that confuses individuality. There are other ways. Intelligence is another one. Plants confuse intelligence too. I think when we really sit with and inquire into the lives of any kind of other organism, we find that this question of intelligence is confused because the concept of intelligence is rooted in the cognitive sciences which took the human mind, the human brain and human mind to be the center of their inquiry. And so, organisms were judged according to their relative position in human style intelligence tests like recognizing yourself in a mirror.  

But of course, there are so many ways to be alive. There are so many ways to rise to the challenge of living. All organisms are confronted with innumerable problems they have to solve, innumerable variability they have to adapt to. Fungi are no different. But they really, I think they make this intelligence question into a really strong and pointy question. When you watch a fungus navigating a labyrinth, for example, and this is something that researchers do, you can create little, microscopic labyrinths and let fungal networks grow through the labyrinth. They can find the shortest path between the entrance and the exit, a bit like slime molds can. Slime molds have become poster organisms for brainless problem solving, but fungi do this as well. And if you watch a fungus going about this labyrinth, when it's confronted with a forked path, it doesn't have to choose one or the other paths, it can branch and take both routes and later on assess which is the more efficient route through the labyrinth. So, intelligence is another category that fungi confuse for us. There are so many more. But these, these, these are two that I play with a lot. 

Elizabeth: Individuality and intelligence. [Merlin: Mhm.] Yeah. So, can you give some other examples of fungal intelligence? It's such an intriguing concept and definitely expands, yeah, expands how we think about intelligence. And how does it change how we think about intelligence? 

Merlin: So, some background, I think it's important to mention is that this notion of intelligence is undergoing a big revision within the biological sciences from lots of points of view, from people studying animals, from people studying plants, from people studying fungi, and bacteria even and other microbes. Because this, it was severely, this concept was severely in need of an update. And so, these days, intelligence is variously defined. And these definitions can take all sorts of shapes, but they usually have in common some traits like being able to solve problems, being able to adapt to changes, being able to make decisions in the organism's way, not necessarily in the way we do, but in the organism's way, make decisions between alternative courses of action.  

So, within these broader, these deepened and expanded definitions of intelligence, it becomes clear that actually to be alive, one has to be intelligent to some degree. And actually, it's more interesting to ask, to what degree is an organism intelligent rather than is an organism intelligent? And what kinds of intelligent behavior does this organism display?  

So, with fungi, a good place to look is to just, when we look twice at many of the things that we, many of the ways they live their life. So mycorrhizal fungi are the type of fungus that I like to study, and maybe we'll come on to that later. They live their life in and around plant roots in a kind of trade relationship where the plants supply the fungus with sugars and fats, so energy containing carbon compounds. The fungus supplies the plant with minerals, mineral nutrients that it's found in the soil, like nitrogen or phosphorus. And they have a kind of trading relationship, it's a very ancient relationship. It goes back to the beginnings of macroscopic life on land. And almost all plants form relationships with these fungi.  

So, if we think about life as one of these fungi for a moment, it could be a network that sprawls over tens of meters. It has millions, billions perhaps, of growing tips all foraging around in the labyrinthine environment in the soil. You have, it could be connected to multiple plants engaged in different kinds of trading relationship with different plants and different types of dynamics of trade with the same plant but at different parts of the plant root system. All of this going on and at the same time, so it's trading with lots of plant partners, it's integrating information from over meters, square meters. Every growing tip is somehow informed by every other growing tip in the network. There are intricately regulated flows moving through these networks. Substances are passing around these networks in complicated ways that we're only just beginning to observe, let alone understand. There are different, these are sensing, this fungus has a sensing body. It's sensitive to temperature, to any number of chemicals, to gravity, pressure, acidity, moisture, so many different kinds of senses it has. And these different senses, these sensory data streams are being funneled through the network and integrated somehow so that the fungus can assess in its way these data streams and act accordingly, informed by what's going on around it.  

So, this is a kind of moment-to-moment challenge that a fungus would face. And this is not an unusual day for this fungus. This is just what it's doing more or less all the time. And so that's the kind of intelligent behavior that it has. The intelligence to regulate itself in the face of these innumerable variables, these innumerable biological partners, very intimate partners, and in constantly changing and heterogeneous environment.  

Elizabeth: It sounds like a very distributed intelligence throughout, yeah. And very responsive. I mean, when you describe that sort of intelligence, then I actually wonder if humans are very intelligent because we are more bounded. And you described so many different variables that the fungus is responding to all the time. But I want to go back to something that you said initially. You said intelligence is being reassessed in plants and animals. And you said even in bacteria. So, are you suggesting intelligence is everywhere throughout life?  

Merlin: I have a lot of time for the view that intelligence is a fundamental feature of life. That's to be alive. One has to have some degree of intelligence. It might be one sort of intelligence, not another sort of intelligence that manifests in different kinds of intelligent behaviors. And some might be much more sophisticated intelligent behaviors than others. But I like thinking about intelligence as decision making, as problem solving, as adapting. And all organisms to some degree do this. So yes, I would say in my view that some degree of intelligence is required to be a living organism.  

Elizabeth: Which does really sort of challenge the hierarchy of humanity as a sort of apex of life.  

Merlin: Yeah, I mean, we're locked in this kind of species narcissism that we've inherited. And it's come cascading down the generations for quite a long time. And I think it's really about time that we loosen the grip of that story. I mean, it's just so much more fun to live in a world where we're not the smartest and the best. I don't really want to live in that story. I have so much fun when I step out of that story. And it's like a sort of cold clammy pair of swimming shorts. You don't want to get back into it. It's happy to leave it behind. 

Elizabeth: I definitely got this- 

Merlin: Not only because it's not just more fun, it's also hugely dangerous. So yeah, I think we benefit in many ways by moving beyond that, by evolving.  

Elizabeth: I definitely got the sense that fungi are running the world, perhaps more than we are. And you sort of, as you said, sort of subvert the dominant paradigm, try to take, it seems try to take a fungal view here. But is that your sense? Are fungi sort of more in charge? And they're, well, so we should talk about mycorrhizal fungi because you just mentioned them and they're everywhere under our feet, right? Do you want to explain what they are and how they contributed for us, and plants? 

Merlin: For sure. Yeah. So about 500 million years ago, when plants were, the ancestors of plants were a freshwater algae. So, kind of puddles of photosynthetic tissue floating in the nutrient soup in rivers and lakes. And they were making their energy from sunlight and carbon dioxide. They were absorbing nutrients from the nutrient soup that they're floating in. And when they started to wash up on these soggy shores, they faced all sorts of new challenges. And foremost among those challenges was how do they acquire the nutrients they need from this complex labyrinthine soil type substrate? And they're not great rangers in this kind of wilderness. They're used to soaking in a nutrient soup. Fungi are great rangers in this kind of complex microenvironment.  

So, it seems that at this very earliest moment of life on land for plants, they struck up a relationship with fungi and these fungi behaved as their root systems, allowing them to reach down through the fungus, a kind of prosthesis, a living prosthesis into the complex environment of the soil, acquiring water, acquiring nutrients and developing a kind of trading relationship. So, this seems to be, certainly plants had fungal relationships for tens of millions of years before they evolved roots. So, these fungal relationships are a more fundamental part of planthood than roots and wood and leaves, fruit, flowers, so many things that we think of as characteristically planty.  

So fast forward to now and almost all plants still depend on these fungi that live in and around their roots and do a similar kind of thing. There are also fungi that live in plant tissues and leaves and stem. Plant life is inseparable from fungal life. In fact, when you look at a plant, what you're looking at is the outcome of a braided history of association. It's what you see is an algae that has evolved to form fungi and fungi that have evolved to farm algae. And you'll see that all in this body that we call a plant. And I mean, this, for me, this is really profound. It changes. It's a kind of parable about how evolution works. Evolution is always evolution with, evolution by association. Symbiosis is a non-negotiable feature of life.  

And so, so yeah, so the life around us, the life that sustains us is part fungus. And these relationships have changed the climate in the past. They've caused global cooling. They've created geological layers. They've done so many things which under the big grand sweep of eons. So, we're just a tiny flash in the pan here. So, if we want to think about like human life in relation to fungal life, then it's kind of incomparable. You know, we've been around for such a short time. Fungi have been around, busily evolving for over a billion years. So, whether they run the show, I mean, they have a huge influence on the show. I'd say that they're pretty important producers in the show, frequently directors, maybe sometimes casting agents and actors and chorus members and audience as well. But obviously it takes all sorts to make a biosphere. So, I wouldn't want to say that they were the ones in charge. Although I often talk like that because I really am really into them.  

Elizabeth: Well, their prevalence, as you make very clear in the book, just it does suggest that they're well, and you just spoke about how they're knitting things together, how they're weaving together even plants, like weaving into the ground basically, the first roots of plants. So, we can't really think about plants without fungi, right? [Merlin: Mhm.] Yeah. And yet it seems like there's so many threads I want to follow, like a fungal network, I suppose. And yet you talk about how, you know, there's departments of botany and there's departments of zoology, but there aren't that many departments of mycology. Why is that if they're so important to life?  

Merlin: So, this really is an on-running theme through any conversation about fungi. You know, you run into the mystery pretty fast. You're two steps away from, oh, we don't know. Fungi are understudied, they're underrepresented in academic courses, they're barely represented in most school curricula. And there are a few reasons for this. One is that there is a taxonomic reason. They were only delimited as a separate kingdom of life in the late sixties. So, it's only in the late sixties that they won their independence. And that meant that before this, fungi were thought of as a kind of lower plant and they were studied in unglamorous corners of botany departments. And so, there's a kind of disciplinary bias that's entrenched because of this. There just hasn't been, you know, the same amount of professorships or any kind of students or research funds or any of the things that create modern scientific knowledge. And part of this is because they're weird. They do things so differently, so strangely. They live most of their lives out of the reach of our immediate senses. They're embedded within whatever they're eating. They're hard to access.  

And so, a lot of the ways that this has changed, that are thinking about fungi has changed, has been through technological advances and new analytical techniques that grant us access to fungal lives in ways that we didn't have access before. And so, this is something that's developing over time, still very fast moving. And so, part of the reason is taxonomic, part of the reason is technological, that we simply know more than we did. And I think there are lots of reasons why we're seeing a kind of surge of interest in fungi right now. You know, this is a moment of ecological crisis and fungi are kind of ecological poster organisms. They embody the basic principle of ecology. They form connections between organisms. They're in a kind of embodied relationship. And they really, I think, speak to this moment that we find ourselves in.  

And there are also networks. We live in a kind of the network to the network zeitgeist, kind of big time, since the web really kicked off in the late 90s. And network thinking has permeated many, many aspects of human inquiry, network models, network thinking. You find it in so many different branches of academic discourse, for example.  

And so, fungi, again, are kind of poster organisms for network thinking. And so, we're seeing that change starting to happen now as people catch on to that. So, there are reasons for the surge of interest now. There are reasons why they've been historically neglected. And I think one of the reasons why it's so fascinating to be studying them now and talking about them now is because we have so many open questions. There are wide open questions wherever you look. And so, I find a sense of excitement when I'm confronted with open questions. And whenever I talk to people about these things, they tend to find a sense of excitement when confronted with the open questions. So, there's also a blessing, I think, to the fact that we know relatively little about fungi, is that we get to experience this time of wild, proliferating inquiry into the mystery. 

Elizabeth: Absolutely. It's stunning to me that it was only in the 60s that they were recognized as their own kingdom. I mean, I didn't know. But to think that recently there was that much that we didn't know about fungi, like that we didn't know they weren't plants, is quite amazing. And it makes me think of these repeated claims of the end of history or the end of exploration. We've discovered everything there is to discover. And yet there's this whole world that's going on at the same time right now as us that you're saying we know very little about. And that is incredibly exciting. And yeah, I think how thrilling to be in a field with so many open questions as far as even, I don't know, how do these things live? What are some of the open questions right now that are interesting to you?  

Merlin: I'm working with a wonderful team in Amsterdam, and we are trying to understand just the basics of information transfer within mycorrhizal fungal networks. How do they stay in touch with themselves? How do they process information? How do they integrate different data streams? And so, you have this amazing setup where we can look inside the fungal cells, inside these tubular cells, and watch the flows moving around in these networks. And watch in real time, you see a kind of, it's not like just a river that's flowing always in one direction, or like a river of traffic in these time lapses of Manhattan, you see. But you can have a flow that's changing speed and comes to a junction, and then it goes up to the right side of the junction, then it comes back and goes up to the left side. And then the whole thing changes direction again, and then speeds up, and then branches off here. And it's completely unpredictable. And with powerful non-random patterns that we're starting to piece together. And it's really basic. It's like, how do they communicate to the parts of different parts of themselves, that there's lots of nutrients here rather than over here, where there's fewer nutrients? How does that feed into their behavior with regard to their plant partner? We're looking at radically simplified systems here in the lab, but still, the basic dynamics of fungal communication eludes us.  

So, this is really exciting. Really looking at fungal behavior and thinking of them as organisms that are behaving. But the really big, really big mysteries are, what are they doing outside in the bustling world, the wet, wild world, say in a tropical forest or any number of forests, or in just an old-growth grassland, or in a city park? At any one moment, what is happening in just one of the fungi, one of the many, many fungi that will be living there? How is it interacting with the other fungi? How is it managing itself? We can't just look through the layers of soil into a fungal network in the field and see what it's doing. We have to use quite clumsy experimental approaches. You can measure transfers by using labeled chemicals that end up more here or more there, and those are powerful techniques. There are various genetic techniques using DNA and RNA, but it's so hard to access. So what fungi are actually doing outside in the world at any one moment, we know very little about.  

We can do very, very elegant, extraordinarily skillful experiments in labs and greenhouses, and there are incredible fungal researchers doing this all the time. It's a very amazing community of dedicated, passionate, wise, and startlingly brilliant people doing this work. But it's still very difficult to extrapolate from a lab experiment to the bustling world out there. It's a problem that many biologists face in any discipline. So, these very basic questions.  

There are other questions about there are so many things we don't know about their metabolisms. How do they ever see the chemical transformations that they ever see? How do they develop enzymes that are able to accomplish certain chemical reactions at certain places in certain times? Why does some fungi do that and not others? The nature of fungal evolution, how these organisms have evolved, how they've evolved with other organisms, how certain abilities have ended up in some fungal lineages and not others. These are all lots of big questions there as well. And there's all the ways that we can partner with fungi to adapt to life on a damaged planet. So, there's all sorts of questions about how can we work with them? Are there ways that we can try and move around some of our pressing problems by involving fungi in our lives somehow?  

Elizabeth: Right. Yeah. In grad school, I shared an office with a grad student who was trying to develop some forms of myco remediation for oil spills. I don't know how far that moved forward, but it does seem like there's some potential, right? Like fungi will eat lots of different things, right? And will they, but can we really call on them to save us or should we save ourselves?  

Merlin: I mean, the saving narrative, I don't know how helpful it is, this sort of salvation narrative. I mean, I can see why we think that way. It's deeply embedded in lots of the major myth structures that have brought us to this moment. But I certainly think that we can look at how organisms evolve over time. And in times of crisis, symbiotic relationships evolve. Symbiosis is not an option. We're always living with, evolving with, being with. And in many of the great turbulent moments or in some of the toughest liminal zones, the most remarkable associations have come, have arisen and have stuck together.  

Lynn Margulis, the great biologist of symbiosis, describes the long-lasting intimacy of strangers and relationships that form in times of crisis or to solve certain pressing problems, enable new possibilities and then remain. So, this is a time of crisis. And are there ways that we can form new types of relationship within human cultures too? Like so different cultures, different academic disciplines, if one's an academic, different age groups, just how can we come together in new ways, interdisciplinarity being a superpower, to form new kinds of structures and organizations and ways of being together that help us adapt creatively to these challenges? And how can we do that with other organisms? And I think Fungi form part of that story.  

So, I wouldn't say that they are our saviors. There are so many problems that Fungi cause for us. There are endless problems they cause. There are fungal diseases, rising incidents of fungal diseases. We're creating conditions for the new evolution of fungal pests. And Fungi will, there's any number of problems that they'll cause for us. And these have been much discussed. So, they're definitely not our saviors. But I think there are many ways that we can partner with Fungi to solve problems. And I think it's actually hard to imagine a future. I mean, Fungi have been so much part of our lives and cultures and societies for such an unknowably long time. We live in a fungal world and whether or not we think about it, so our future, it will be at least as fungal as the past. And perhaps we can make it a little more consciously fungal and deal with some of our problems. 

Elizabeth: It does seem like, I appreciate your caution around the salvation narrative, because certainly there's a lot of caveats there. It does seem like this recent knowledge and exploration of fungi and awareness, and then as you said, the technological advancements that allow us to study them more carefully and closely. It does seem like maybe it's opening up new ways of thinking about the world and new ways of being in the world.  

So, you talked about the network metaphor, which is so prevalent now, of course, in this internet age. And you talked about fungi being like the sort of original networkers or web. And so, I was thinking about whether, which way the metaphor goes. Is it a technological metaphor that we're applying to fungal networks, or is it an organic metaphor from the fungi that we're then applying to our technology? So, I'm curious about your thoughts on that. But in either case, it seems to, the network metaphor or web metaphor seems to give us new ways of thinking about back to the beginning about individuality, autonomy, interconnection, responsibility, and so on, which could be helpful in this time. What do you think?  

Merlin: Yeah. So which way does the arrow go in the metaphor. It's such a tangled, isn't it? I think it often goes both ways at once. And certainly, I mean, you talk to many cosmologists now and the way that the whole universe is conceived, this is a cosmic web, you know, with huge filaments of gas and galaxies joining galactic super clusters in a kind of vast network at the largest possible scale. So, it's not just fungi that do networks. Networks seem to be a feature of the reality that we inhabit. But yeah, I mean, sometimes in specific instances, you can totally see a computer metaphor that's been applied to fungi. Like wood wide web is a classic case of, it's a helpful metaphor, you know, it makes vivid the idea of plants and fungi living in shared networks. I use this term. And I think it can be, it's vivid. It opens our eyes to a kind of relationship that we might not otherwise have thought of a kind of social networking. But at the same time, it's a ultimately a machine metaphor. And it is a metaphor that makes, usually makes fungi the kind of passive cables joining up trees. It renders fungi quite passive. And I think that's very far from the truth, because fungi are busily, actively engaged in their lives. They're far from passive cables linking up and routed. So anyway, that's one case where you can see a computer metaphor applied to fungal life.  

There are lots of aspects of network behavior that seem to be more organic than mechanistic. You know, networks can grow in interesting ways. There are kind of different ways of thinking about networks and analyzing them, which reveal them to be a kind of, to have organic emergent, organic like emergent properties that we see in non-human organizations. So, I don't think there's always a sort of sharp distinction between human and non-human. But no, it's important to think about that.  

And it's important to think about that when we make sense of symbiotic relationships, you know, because the whole history of the study of symbiotic relationships has been fraught with metaphors, you know, from the very, since 1869 or so, when lichens were being studied and thought of as symbiotic organisms formed from the close relationship of fungi and algae. The relationship between masters and slaves, men and women, the relationships between nations, all sorts of human societal metaphors were applied to these intimate relationships. And then, and then those relationships were used to naturalize, so to different kinds of human behavior. So, oh, we live in a industrial capitalist society, unmitigated conflict and competition. This is a natural state of affairs. Look at these organisms over here doing their unmitigated conflict and competition. Or we live in a mutual aid, societies are sharing of a socialist structure. Look over there, look at these examples of animals doing mutual aid. So, it's such a convoluted process and actually a really fascinating one. It's one of the reasons why the history of the science of symbiosis is so juicy, you know, because it's a prism through which our societal values is dispersed and we enter a kind of hall of mirrors and see that in all sorts of different directions. So that's a convoluted way to think about this question of which way the arrow points. And I've actually forgotten what the next part of the question was. 

Elizabeth: I'll just keep threading along. I really appreciate that our social metaphors then shape how we, what we observe in the world around us, right? And how we interpret it as much as for understanding human social life. And I think that idea is often overlooked, sort of the naturalistic fallacies, like, oh, we see something in nature therefore, you know, it must be the case, sort of forgetting about the interpretive lens that human society puts on it to describe what the relationship is. And when we were thinking about this idea of networks and interconnecting threads all throughout the cosmos, it occurred to me also that even in the human body, like the fascia is the understudied connective tissue of the human body that I think also wasn't really known about until recent decades. And so, at a lot of different levels, we're starting to perceive this connective tissue that really was ignored for so many centuries of human scientific study. And maybe it provides new metaphors. So, I think what was arising, a question that was arising is what kind of new metaphors might we, might you be discovering in your relationships with fungi? I'm not even going to say your study of, but more of like a partnership with fungi, like what new metaphors might they be suggesting to you?  

Merlin: Well, you know, one of the problems I have with sort of conventional ways of representing networks is that we tend to think of them a bit like how you'd sketch them on a piece of paper as entities joined with a line, a dotted line sometimes. But the idea that there's self-standing entities that can be joined with a dotted line. And it feels like the kind of thing we do in sort of in a recovery mode from years of reductive experimental science where we sort of cut the world into little pieces and now we're trying to string it back together again because we're so drowning in detail and have lost sight of the big picture. And so, let's just connect these different pieces together with a line connecting the different parts, the different components that have been separated somehow.  

But really, it's these relationships are, it's less like, you know, two entities joined with a line. It's more like there's a picture by Escher with drawing hands, with one hand drawing the other hand, which is drawing the other hand at the same time. It's a more co-creative process as a kind of shimmering relational field that sustains and indeed, it's sort of almost ontologically prior to the existence of these entities in the first place. And I think that's a very profound shift in perspective. And so, I try to think as much as I can in that mode of relationship not being something we stir in afterwards to help us recover from a reductive mindset, but something which is absolutely fundamental that gives rise to the very things we think of as entities in the first place.  

So, a metaphor that I find really helpful for that, that I find in the fungal world is that of lichens. Lichens, these symbiotic organisms, what you see, the body of the lichen that you see is emergent from any number of relationships between fungi, algae, bacteria. There are more types of relationship within lichens being uncovered by the month, more or less. But what you see is a form, often complex form, often very wild chemistry going on inside lichens, crazy colors, abilities to live in extreme environments, crazy abilities to digest certain compounds or substances like rock. They devour rock, many lichens do. But the individual partners, if you want to break the organism down into its parts, the members of this lichen, they don't form a structure anything like what you see the lichen forming. So, it's a bit like the elements of hydrogen and oxygen coming together to make water, two flammable gases creating water. And it's totally sort of unexpected from first principles.  

And likewise in lichens, what you see is this wild product of relationship, a kind of non-linear explosion that happens out of these relationships. So, the concept of a lichen, I find an enormously fertile metaphor for thinking about human relationships, for thinking about relationship between formal organisms, for thinking about clusters of ideas. Any time that I try to think about networks in this more co-constitutive way, lichens, is a metaphor that I reach for. There are others too, but that's fine. 

Elizabeth: That's so great. So, I have a friend who studied lichens in grad school, and this is just a small joke. So, she and I went to an event, and she met someone new, and he said, what do you do? And she said, I'm a lichenologist. And he said, that's cool, but what do you do? And she said, I'm a lichenologist. And he was like, but what do you study? And she said, I'm a lichenologist. He thought she was saying, I'm like an ologist. And he thought it was too much California talk, like I'm like an ologist. [Merlin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.] I just had to drop that in.  

I just love this phrase that you said, the shimmering ontological field and of this co-creative capacity of fungi. And it made me think of some Indigenous concepts actually that I've read about like Deborah Bird Rose has an essay called ‘The Shimmer’, where she talks about in Aboriginal Australian culture, there's this idea that when things are really alive, they have a shimmer to them. And it can also get dimmed if various negative things happen to that livingness. And so, I wonder if there's a parallel there, if you've observed the shimmer in your field studies, or what more you have to say about that? 

Merlin: Hm. Yeah, so I certainly think that many of these concepts that we're discussing are in the modern sciences, they're often talked about as discoveries. But I think it's more remembering, I think these are things, these are ideas, the idea that we live in an intimate, reciprocal web of relations. And this is, I think, something that humans have known for a very long time in different parts of the world and different traditional knowledge systems. And that it's in some sense, modern biology is catching up, or at least, unforgetting. And so yeah, I think that's a key point that this isn't, much of this isn't really new in principle. There are new stories, there are new findings about certain organisms and the way they relate. But I think the bigger picture that is revealing is not a new understanding, but a welcome remembering of a very ancient understanding.  

But yeah, the shimmer is, I mean, so I think so there’s fields of relation, you know, I think about it as a field, because it's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to picture, we're so used to thinking in terms of individuals, it's hard to think about how these individuals, what their relationship actually looks like. But of course, their relationship looks like both of, if you're talking about two partners, looks like both of them. And if you think about time, if you think about these organisms as living on the sort of growing front of the present moment, but with evolutionary histories, stretching in like roots, tangling deep into the past. And if you think about the roots of these two entities, these two humans, it could be, it could be two, a human and a dog or human and a cat, you think about the, the roots of these entities, stretching back through the past, tangling around each other, you know, in this big, braided kind of stream of togetherness. And so, the, what you're seeing is the just the growing tip of a relationship. And, and so, and so, yeah, so I like to think about organisms as processes like that, rather than things.  

And when I think about organisms as processes, you know, we were processes, we, you're the stuff that makes up your body is today is not the same stuff that made up your body a few years ago. So, we're kind of fields of stability through which matter is passing. And, and when you take this process, your view, there are, there are lots of helpful metaphors. Music is an helpful metaphor because music is inherently a process. You can't have a snapshot as music at an instance, it's inconceivable. But there are other good metaphors of process like wave patterns, flow patterns and, and wave standing wave patterns. And these are shimmering patterns.  

These patterns actually shimmer, you know, I spent some time studying faraday wave patterns where you vibrate liquids and you look at the standing wave patterns that arise, complex forms that arise through the interference of, of regular repeating and oscillating waves. And these are shimmering patterns, you know, these, these absolutely shimmer. And so, I like this metaphor of the shimmering because I'm led into these very fundamental processes that can inform the way that we make sense of processes in biology.  

Elizabeth: Fantastic. And, and these, these metaphors and these understandings seem to be very challenging to modern industrial society. I'm wondering, like how you, I mean, the implications are liberatory, but they're also, I would say, threatening to the status quo. Liberatory in that they could lead us into perhaps a more collective, collaborative, compassionate future. But I feel like also the, the status quo is, is, doesn't want to be disturbed. So, I'm curious when you talk about the implications, like whether you get any kind of pushback from the status quo and in terms of like this idea, these ideas that break down the autonomous individual could be threatening to capitalism, for example, and property. And, and so it, for these wider implications, what sort of responses are you getting? 

Merlin: I've had no one, I mean, most people tend to be quite interested in this way of thinking. And there's plenty of people talking about this at the moment, and I'm just coming at it from a fungal point of view, but it's, I think being invited to question these categories that we might not think about, but which turns out, organize so many of our behaviors, I think that's quite a compelling activity. But they're not necessarily that it would change the way you want things to be or change the way that you go about your life afterwards.  

You might just take a little trip, a little holiday into a kind of a web of intimate reciprocal dependence and then step back into a hyper individualist mode. In fact, it's very hard not to do that when we're living in the societies that we're living in, because at some point I do have to produce my passport or produce my driving license. And, and once again, my, my individuality is reified. And, and also there are certain ways that this concept is persistent, like it does feel to me like I behave as, you know, as some, in some way, a relevant unit of biological organization, that there is some, there is some relevance to the me-ness of me. So, I wouldn't want to blow that all away either.  

But I think, yeah, I think these ideas can be really, really threatening and destabilizing because if you live in a capitalist system and capitalism depends on individuals acting in there rationally, and if there aren't really individuals anymore, then everything comes crashing down. So yeah, I think these ideas are very powerful. I think they can helpfully erode many of the decaying structures that we live within that aren't fit for purpose. I think they don't necessarily lead us to a better, more generative, happy place. They could also lead us to all sorts of problematic places as well. But I think they're also just recurring themes. You know, you don't need biologists to preach about this stuff to feel like this is the case. I think, you know, this is something that these ways of being and knowing and understanding are something that we often experience intuitively in our lives, in the stories that we hear from the past and ways we imagine the ways that our minds work and the way that we like the arts and the way that we create and play and form loving relationships, the way that we are affected by emotions, all these ways. So yes, I think these are powerful ideas. I think they could lead us towards positive change, but not necessarily. 

Elizabeth: Sure. And earlier you gave the caveat that we shouldn't think of fungi as our saviors or something. It seems like they're more multi-vocal than that. They're maybe more like a trickster or, yeah, or even, again, a metaphor that we don't really have yet. I just love the shimmer. I'm going to be thinking about that a lot more. And yeah, and maybe fungi are providing some new metaphors to think about. And just now, and in your book, you've talked a lot about how they do, they potentially break down these boundaries around the individual. And then you said, but you were sort of reified as an individual as well. But I was thinking, also you're surrounded by so many creative, super creative, innovative thinkers in your life, like your dad, Terrence McKenna, Paul Stamets, David Abram. And so, I'm wondering how they have also sort of influenced you, if so, but also sort of extended the boundaries of who Merlin is.  

Merlin: They've had a huge role to play in extending the boundaries of who I am, as have anyone that I've ever felt close to. And I think we're all so affected by the beings that we live around. It might be a pet that we have. We might feel like our cat or our dog or our tortoise can somehow give us a new mind to explore the world, give us new perspectives, help us to step out of our frames of reference and explore new possibilities. And so, yeah, so these people you mentioned have all been influential. But I almost feel uncomfortable singling them out because all of those that I love and respect have shaped me. And I feel like it's just a part of being a human, that we are porous and that we always thinking with and imagining with. But yes, I feel very blessed to have known these folks and the many others who have taught me and who have played with me and who have challenged me and invited me into new places.  

Elizabeth: Great point about how it's not, as you said earlier, it's not like a point-to-point line in a network, but it's actually all part of the network. So that we're not only imagining nodes in the network, but all the filaments influencing and connecting. That's such a nice way to think about it. So, I know that we're nearly to the end of our scheduled discussion time. Is there something that I should have asked you that I didn't yet?  

Merlin: I mean, I’ve been having a great time. I can't think of anything that you should have asked me.  

Elizabeth: Excellent. Um, oh, here's one other thing that I did want to ask you. You write about being sort of a speculative biologist and I was super interested in that idea connecting more sort of philosophical approach with lots of field work and lots of lab work. And I wondered what sort of reception that has among biologists. I mean, certainly your work and your book has such broader implications. But I know that sometimes scientists don't want to push the speculation too far. So, I'm just curious about that response. 

Merlin: You know, it really depends what activity I'm engaged in. If I'm writing a book for a general audience, then part of that process is going to be letting people into a more personal position, a more personal mode. And that's filled with speculation. We all speculate. We all imagine. We all wonder. And so, if I'm sitting around at night with my scientist friends and we're having some wild conversation filled with speculations, then we'd all be speculating wildly, you know, and that's so much fun. If I am writing a paper talking about an inquiry that has been made involving certain sets of data in certain ways, then there might be some speculation there, but it might be quite clearly marked as this is speculative. This is not what the data says, but we're thinking forwards in time because there's a kind of responsibility in that mode to be clear about what you're drawing from the evidence and what you're imagining as a future possibility.  

So, for me, it just depends on the context. But I don't think speculation is an option. Imagination is not an option. We all are imaginative speculative beings. It's so fundamental to our conscious minds. I think it's more about how we relate to that. So, when in the book, I gently tease some of the scientific structures that marginalize speculation as if it's something that shouldn't happen here. You know, we might do it at night, but it's not going to feature in our papers. But it's a quite a funny opera to think of people sort of separating part of themselves and putting forwards a non-speculative, strict part of themselves in another place. But it's also a misconception that people who aren't practicing scientists can have about scientists. Is it that because cold blooded, rational beings. But in fact, scientists are and have always been emotional, whole, imaginative, playful beings trying to make sense of a world that was never made to be cataloged and systematized. So, I think there are different ways that it can cut. But I think it's a fun discussion to have to return to that place of imaginative mind, of a wandering mind, and then to feel a way that that unites us as humans. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, absolutely. Because it's that wonder and awe that prompts the questions in the first place, right? Like, I wonder what's happening here? I wonder how this truffle came to be here? Or why the dogs love them so much? Or whatever. Yeah, so I really appreciate that, how you take us back to wonder. And I loved the initial vignette of trying to follow these mycorrhizal fungi with your nose and just trying to follow them through the forest floor. I think it really vividly puts us into the scene. Thank you. It's been so fun chatting. But yeah, I just really want to thank you for taking the time. And I know it's getting to be evening over there. But I was really stoked to chat with you today. And I really appreciate you joining us here at CIIS. 

Merlin: Thanks for having me. It's been wonderful to chat. 

Elizabeth: Absolutely. Great.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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