Uncertainty is healthy

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is a fantastic book all about mushrooms and fungi but what made it a breezy read for me was how weird they are. It’s like Merlin got his hands on creatures from another dimension where the rules of biology simply don’t apply. 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 horizontally, or from creature to creature. Imagine if you bumped into Hans Zimmer and now you can play the piano. Weird! Second: Merlin has a whole chapter about lichens which messed me up. Lichens are odd because they’re symbiotes, Venom-style, 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…