What science can learn from fungi?

Merlin Sheldrake, the son of the well-known biologist and science critic Rupert Sheldrake, researches fungi. In the process, he gets very close to them - be it in the Panamanian rainforest, on an LSD trip, or while brewing beer or fermenting. He is fascinated by the world of interactions between living things, from which he learns about the possibilities and unanswered questions of science.

evolve: How did you come to your research about fungi?

Merlin Sheldrake: I've always been interested in the way that organisms relate to one another. One of my main interests was the subject of symbiosis, the study of the ways that organisms have found to live alongside one another in very intimate ways. There are many different examples of symbiosis in the living world as a fundamental feature of life. But fungi are really a blockbuster in symbiosis, with relationships that have shaped life on the planet.

e: In doing this research about fungi and symbiosis, what have been the most striking insights for you into this world of interrelationship?

MS: I find it amazing that the ancestors of mycorrhizal fungi played a key role in the process of the ancestors of land plants moving onto land about 500 million years ago. The whole history of the terrestrial biosphere, of life on land and all the ecosystems in which we live and sustain ourselves, is the outcome of an ancient relationship between algae and fungi. This changes my relationship with plants and ecosystems because I think of these organisms as communities of organisms. When you eat the plants, you're also eating countless fungi that live within the plant.

Intelligence without Brain

e: Can you say more about that different story of the living world? What did fungi teach you about that?

MS: Fungi are very indeterminate organisms; they don't have a set body plan as we do. They have to explore their environment flexibly by remodelling themselves constantly. So, there's no center of control. Fungal coordination is managed both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. We have to get used to the idea that these organisms are able to coordinate their behavior in a very different way from the way that we do, which involves the central processing hub of our brain.

I’m researching the way that fungi can explore the world, how they can distribute their bodies and manage intricate tradeoffs and integrate sensory data streams from different parts of their network and somehow decide on a suitable course of action, path for growth or metabolic outcome. They can do all this without a brain, which asks us to expand and deepen our understanding of how organisms sense and perceive the world.

e: How are these aspects of your research of fungi challenging our current view on organic life and our role as human beings or human culture in the web of life?

MS: I think there are a number of ways that we can trace our problems back to an understanding of ourselves as neatly separable individuals – separate from other humans and separate from the living world that sustains us. And it's this kind of separation that allows us to justify the exploitation of the living world and other humans. If we understand ourselves as part of a system in which we were firmly embedded, then it wouldn't make any sense for us to degrade and destroy those living systems beyond the point of their regeneration. And because fungi and microbes in general challenge our understanding of individuality, they can help us to expand our concept of the self, of individuality and selfhood. When it turns out that actually, we aren't simply individuals, that there are microbes inside of us without which we couldn't grow and behave as we do, we have to adjust the way we think about our own bodies.

We also have to adjust the way we think about the bodies of others. We ourselves turn into ecosystems, into ecologies. And if we are embodiments of ecosystems and ecologies, we can understand in a different way the ecosystems and ecologies that are bigger than us, that sustain us and surround us. This understanding can help us to move from a story of separation to a story of interconnection and codependency. And that, in turn, can lead us towards more responsible, sustainable life-supporting practices that nourish the organisms that we depend on and also nourish future generations of humans.

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Integrating the parts into the whole

e: Did this research also change your view on science or what it means to be a scientist?

MS: I think we're witnessing a big moment of change in the sciences because there has been a very committed program of reduction. For the last few decades there's been a kind of questioning, how do we combine all this information about small parts of organisms into a coherent whole? There's an emphasis on grants across all different types of fields of biology that foster interdisciplinary collaboration to bring different fields together, to make new connections, to combine perspectives. There's more and more emphasis on building models that can combine a big dataset into a bigger picture understanding.

The research on fungi and the study of symbiosis pushes hard against the limits of the way in which we structured the sciences. If you want to study the way that plants and fungi interact, or plants and animals interact, there are for instance the departments of geology and plant biology, that research these organisms. But how are you going to study the interaction between these kinds of organisms? The professionalization of the sciences which took place in the 19th century divided into many areas of professional expertise, separated into different departmental buildings. In these research universities, it is difficult to study the way that all the different types of organism relate to each other because it requires varying leaps across disciplinary boundaries.

WE OURSELVES TURN INTO ECOSYSTEMS.

e: You seem to be an example of a scientist who is participatory in the way you study things. In your book, you speak about science not being a rational endeavor, but also having to do with fantasy, with intuition. You are also doing interesting experiments, like taking LSD to find out how fungi feel. You seem to interact deeply with what you are researching.

MS: I like interacting with what I'm researching because when you're researching something, you are already in an interaction. Sometimes we can pretend that we're not, that we're just doing experiments. But there's another level of relationship which doesn't always get talked about. For instance, scientists I know follow a species of monkeys in the forest of Panama. They form a connection with these organisms, which is not what you talk about in your papers. This is the reason why people study biology in the first place, because they're fascinated by these lifeforms. They want to understand them, which stems from a basic curiosity. I like to follow this curiosity and also go new ways because it makes inquiry more fun. And we as scientists can also talk about these parts of our studies, these curiosities. We can drop the pretense that we're just cold-blooded, rational researchers behaving like textbook scientists in white coats – which, of course, sometimes has to happen. There are some protocols which need to be involved; we have to be careful and methodical. But I don't think that admitting that our passionate curiosity will detract from that more formal part of our study. I think it's possible to do both.

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Consciousness is Inside

e: Do you see that such a widening of the understanding of the practice of science is needed or helpful for the development of our understanding of science?

MS: It might help the communications between scientists and the public. And it might help people who aren't practicing researchers to understand a little bit more about what it means to be a researcher, to make this a human practice rather than something behind closed doors in an arcane world of technical secrets. This general scientific literacy could increase the communication of science in society, to build up a more realistic picture of what scientists can and can't do. It's important for everyone to see what's possible and what's not so that we learn how to manage our uncertainty and expectations more responsibly.

e: Where do you see the limits of science, what science may not be so equipped to handle?

MS: I think, there are a few areas. One that stands out is the so-called hard problem of consciousness, which arises for the simple reason that we are asked to believe that matter and energy, the very basic physical processes that underpin the universe are all purposeless, meaningless, feelingless. But somehow these molecules and energetic processes can give rise – in our bodies at least – to a purposeful, meaningful, feelingful interior subjective world. And how is that happening? Many people are wrestling with this hard problem of consciousness because in the scientific procedure, you try to see things objectively from the outside, you look from the outside on the subject matter. But the process of being conscious is inherently inside. It's a subjective process, that you can’t turn easily into the subject of an objective study. There's a very serious limit to what this empirical method and knowledge can provide us with.

e: At this moment, with the Corona pandemic, science plays a certain role in society. Everyone is looking: what are the scientific facts? There's a debate about the right facts and the right statistics. Is this time giving you new insights to the relevance, the role, and the limits of science?

MS: I don't think it gives new understanding, but it's making things very clear about pre-existing aspects of the sciences and the sciences in society. For example, the way that uncertainty is communicated. It is very difficult for us to manage uncertainty and the whole field of statistics is there to help us deal with uncertainty. But scientists are talking to a public who wants some hard facts. And when you don't have a hard fact to give them, you have a margin of uncertainty to provide them with. There's an expectation in society which scientists are not able to provide. People expect clarity from scientists, but there's a gap between this expectation and how science actually works. So, communication could be improved.

This points to another limit of what science can do for us. When governments say we're following the science, it’s not clear what they mean, because the decisions that you're making as a government need a political decision. They can be informed by these scientists, but the decisions are political decisions, not scientific decisions. A lot of politicians are hiding behind science as a kind of monolithic shield that they can use to defend themselves from public anger or even basic questioning.

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Science and Spirituality

e: Your father Rupert Sheldrake has worked for many years on that frontier of widening our understanding of science. How did the thinking of your father influence your work?

MS: My father is an amazing student of the living world. Growing up with him, my curiosity about biological phenomena was always encouraged. And he is an amazing teacher as well. So, he's played a big part in my scientific education. He spent a lot of time being concerned with the perils of reduction at all costs and trying to think about things on a bigger scale and a more holistic level. This influenced the way that I think, and why I have chosen to study ecology -- the way that organisms relate to one another. When you're studying ecology, you have to take this bigger picture and have to look for explanations at the level of ecosystems, rather than the level of the molecules within cells, within organisms. I've acquired from him a desire to see more holistic explanations being played out within the sciences besides reductive ones.

e: Today, there are many efforts to bring science together with spirituality, and to bridge a gap between the scientific exploration of phenomena and spiritual interiority. How do you see this possibility, this meeting of science and spirituality?

MS: I think there's a lot of very fascinating work. For example, the scientific study of spiritual practices. When you sing in a large group of people, your stress hormones go down. There are many health benefits to fasting, which is a very ancient spiritual practice. The benefits of meditation for stress, anxiety and depression have been well studied. Or the power of prayer to help people heal. Then there is the psychedelic research, in which have profound mystical experiences in hospital rooms which helps people to overcome depression or addictions. There's a huge amount that we've been learning here for a while now. This research can help us verify that these practices, which people have been doing for a very long time, are an important part of being healthy as individuals and as cultures.

e: The sciences and the natural sciences, as they are practiced until now, are based on a materialistic worldview. As you said in terms of the hard problem of consciousness, there are questions that science can’t explain. Like the emergence of life from matter or the emergence of consciousness from a material universe. On the other hand, there are spiritual traditions, which open a subjective insight into consciousness as something that humans have, but that might be also a feature of reality. I don't know if that's going too far, but do you see a way that those seemingly opposite views on reality can come into interaction or into dialogue in a deeper way?

MS: Yes, I think so. And I don't think there's any particular reason why they need to be segregated in this way. There are lots of things that science and natural scientists can't readily account for, like why is there something rather than nothing? This is a big question. When we just believe in the totality of the physical natural world, the nature of the solar systems of the universe, that we have access to with our empirical testing and investigation, then how is it possible for us ever to explain why there is something rather than nothing in the first place? That feels to me like an entirely different kind of question that we can't deal with through an experimental inquiry.