May 13, 2020

"Most fungi take the form of tiny cylindrical threads, from which hyphal tips branch in all directions, creating a meandering, gossamer-like network..."

"... known as mycelium. Fungus has been breaking down organic matter for millions of years, transforming it into soil. A handful of healthy soil might contain miles of mycelia, invisible to the human eye. It’s estimated that there are a million and a half species of fungus, though nearly ninety per cent of them remain undocumented.... [T]he hyphal tips of mycelium seem to communicate with one another, making decisions without a real center.... ...Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who was taken with Thomas Piketty’s 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' and its insights on inequality. She wondered how mycorrhizal networks, the symbiotic intertwining of plant systems and mycelium, deal with their own, natural encounters with inequity. Kiers exposed a single fungus to an unequally distributed supply of phosphorus. Somehow the fungus 'coordinated its trading behavior across the network'... essentially shuttling phosphorus to parts of the mycelial network for trade with the plant system according to a 'buy low, sell high' logic.... Scientists still don’t understand how fungi coördinate, control, and learn from such behaviors, just that they do. 'How best to think about shared mycorrhizal networks?... Are we dealing with a superorganism? A metropolis? A living Internet? Nursery school for trees? Socialism in the soil? Deregulated markets of late capitalism, with fungi jostling on the trading floor of a forest stock exchange? Or maybe it’s fungal feudalism, with mycorrhizal overlords presiding over the lives of their plant laborers for their own ultimate benefit.'"

From "The Secret Lives of Fungi/They shape the world—and offer lessons for how to live in it" (in The New Yorker)(with the note: "Published in the print edition of the May 18, 2020, issue, with the headline 'Fungus Among Us.'" I can see why they regretted that title, but maybe just own it. You did it. Live with it.)

28 comments:

RK said...

Whoa, second post of the day on psychedelics.

Fernandinande said...

Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who was taken with Thomas Piketty’s 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'

Steve Sailer took apart that work pretty well.

and its insights on inequality.

I hate that crap - how about disgusting fungi live on insects and spiders, so humans should do that too!

Mr. O. Possum said...

The spore, the merrier.

Crimso said...

"natural encounters with inequity"

Bullshit. Justice is a human concept. The universe is neither equitable nor inequitable. It doesn't give a fuck. Know what else doesn't give a fuck? Fungi.

n.n said...

Capitalist markets are democratic systems with sufficient regulation to minimize progress of labor, environmental, regulatory, and financial arbitrage. They are, in principle, free of central/single/monopolopy distortions, designed to dynamically optimize price determination and resource allocation in an environment where resources are finitely available and accessible.

wild chicken said...

Yeah humans were doing this is Mesopotamia 6000 years ago. Trading, moving stuff around to where it was needed.

It's capitalism, not socialism.

Tommy Duncan said...

"How best to think about shared mycorrhizal networks?... Are we dealing with a superorganism?"

Is this a precursor to the Borg Hive? Or just a preview of a Sanders presidency?

mandrewa said...

There is a TED talk, Toby Kiers: Lessons from fungi on markets and economics.

Now I haven't seen it yet and I am about to watch it, but based on what I've read above and the title I'll bet that this the decision process of the fungi is analogous to the decision process of a market.

I'm guessing something like this: is a bidding process where many actors (subunits of the fungi) bid for a unit of a resource and the resource then goes to whichever actor bid the most.

Lewis Wetzel said...

In every transaction, each of the actors try to achieve the greatest marginal improvement in value.
That and the pareto distribution explain everything.
Humans can choose what they value. Fungi cannot.

Maillard Reactionary said...

"How best to think about shared mycorrhizal networks?..."

My suggestion would be, probably none of the above.

All of the (perhaps not completely serious) speculations in the following paragraph illustrate humans' strong need to make stuff up when confronted by something they don't understand. One problem with this is the tendency to confuse a satisfying metaphor with real understanding.

We have only begun to have an inkling of the sophistication and complexity of what we might call "interspecies networks" (that expression itself a metaphor) between the fungal and plant kingdoms, and amongst those groups themselves. It is a time for careful observation and experiment, not looking for cute takeaways that reinforce a political viewpoint or aesthetic longing about Nature.

Many, perhaps most, of these soil fungi and bacteria cannot be cultured in the lab on agar plates and such. Quite a few produce strange and complex defensive and signaling chemicals which defy human synthesis. One big investigational challenge is simply coming up with techniques to study the organisms where they live.

Humility is indicated.

Kyzer SoSay said...

This is what passes for intellectual thought on the Left. Learning about society by studying soil fungus.

Hint to all the deranged leftists - metaphors can only be stretched so far. If a philosophy grad took a big enough bong hit, he could probably find lessons about capitalism by examining the geological formation of the Dover cliffs. But it doesn't matter because it wouldn't make sense or be of any use.

chuck said...

I always figured that if Marx was any good his ideas would apply equally well to animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi as they did to people. Lysenko had the same idea...

Bob Boyd said...

More conventionally religious people see God in everything. This is the same thing.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

we loved Pete Moss in the detective series

..."Sphagnum P.I."

frenchy said...

Is there anything in there useful against toenail fungus?

mandrewa said...

Tony Kiers calls the fungi "tiny capitalists". They are, according to Kiers, ruthlessly selfish and utterly non-altruistic and yet somehow the net result of the market that they build is to move resources from "rich" plants to "poor" plants and to enable all of the plants that are connected by the trading network of the fungi to survive all sorts of stresses. (Now she didn't explicitly say that last thing but I take it that is what she meant.)

It sounds as if in many ways there are literal parallels to the strategies of the fungi and the strategies in a human market.

A thought that jumps out at me is that this is not only an example of a non-human market. This is also an example of non-human thinking. The many strategies of the fungi are embedded in their genes but something had to come up with those ideas in the first place. And that something is natural selection. So even though the fungi can not think as we think, it does think thoughts or something like over great lengths of time and across the generations.

Gabriel said...

"The Secret Lives of Fungi/They shape the world—and offer lessons for how to live in it"

I hate this "whatever is is right" crap. You can find anything in nature to justify anything you want to do, and all the other stuff going on in nature will contradict it.

There are feminists who go on about how animals can't give consent--duck sex is pretty horrifying--and they sure aren't saying we should emulate that.

Narr said...

No fungus among us . . . and no cirrus near us!

Narr
You people asleep, or what?

madAsHell said...

Are we dealing with a superorganism? A metropolis? A living Internet? Nursery school for trees? Socialism in the soil? Deregulated markets of late capitalism, with fungi jostling on the trading floor of a forest stock exchange? Or maybe it’s fungal feudalism, with mycorrhizal overlords presiding over the lives of their plant laborers for their own ultimate benefit.'"

"White Noise" with Michael Keaton was a TERRIBLE movie!!

madAsHell said...

Wow!

We have moderation. Has the shit hit the fan??

Narr said...

Look at the tags.

Capitalism, mushrooms.

Narr
Yes, yes it does

chuck said...

Is there anything in there useful against toenail fungus?

VapoRub. Just smoosh it in there.

RigelDog said...

How do it know? I'm going with Manley, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God, it will flame out, like shining from shook foil."

Scott Patton said...

Paul Stamets - mycologist on Joe Rogan's Podcast #1035.

Narr said...

Forget Piketty. Walter Scheidel is a bigger thinker, about inequality.

Narr
And its remedies

Lurker21 said...

Lots of French philosophers - Deleuze, Guattari - talking about the "rhizome." I never understood what the heck they were going on about.

The rhizome is a lonely child, who's waiting by the park
The rhizome is in charge of finding treasure in the dark
And watching over lucky clover, isn't that bizarre?
And every little thing the rhizome does
Leaves you answered with a question mark.

Unknown said...

Commies see communism everywhere in nature.

News at at 11.

Ryan said...

"A handful of healthy soil might contain miles of mycelia..."

Perhaps the title should have been "humongous fungus among us"