wavefunction.fieldofscience.comThe Curious Wavefunction

↓ FS AbC CC CH CO / VL CW DM GMP GW HG MPM PX PY RRR SW TPP VM Home Angry by Choice Catalogue of Organisms Chinleana Doc Madhattan Games with Words Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience History of Geology Moss Plants and More Pleiotropy Plektix RRResearch Skeptic Wonder The Culture of Chemistry The Phytophactor The View from a Microbiologist Variety of Life Field of Science Diocleae 1 day ago in Variety of Life Key Limpets 3 days ago in Catalogue of Organisms Robot stories 3 days ago in Doc Madhattan Birthdays during a pandemic 5 days ago in The Phytophactor A new Russian Covid-19 vaccine looks promising, but did they fabricate some of their data? 1 week ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience Life. Distributed. 2 weeks ago in Thinking about a post-pandemic world 2 months ago in RRResearch Daily routine 6 months ago in Angry by Choice The political brainwashing by the rich 7 months ago in Pleiotropy De La Beche's Awful Changes 7 months ago in History of Geology How do we mourn human civilization? 8 months ago in PLEKTIX Easter fires: Rainbow demonstration rises again 1 year ago in The Culture of Chemistry A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China 1 year ago in Chinleana Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM 2 years ago in Field Notes Bryophyte Herbarium Survey 2 years ago in Moss Plants and More Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV 4 years ago in Rule of 6ix WE MOVED! 4 years ago in Games with Words If You Are Against Nuclear Power 4 years ago in The Astronomist A New Wave of Science Blogging? 5 years ago in Labs Update: Tree of Eukaryotes (parasitology edition) 5 years ago in Skeptic Wonder post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry! 5 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez 5 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens 5 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain Out of Office 6 years ago in inkfish The Molecular Circus 7 years ago in A is for Aspirin The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl 8 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution Girlybits 101, now with fewer scary parts! 8 years ago in C6-H12-O6 Lab Rat Moving House 9 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs 9 years ago in Disease Prone JAPAN'S RADIOACTIVE OCEAN | DEEP BLUE HOME 9 years ago in The Greenhouse Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby 9 years ago in The Large Picture Blog in The Biology Files Show 5 Show All Musings on science, history, philosophy and literature Life. Distributed. By Wavefunction on Monday, September 07, 2020 One of my favorite science fiction novels is “The Black Cloud” by Fred Hoyle. It describes an alien intelligence in the form of a cloud that approaches the earth and settles by the sun. Because of its proximity to the sun the cloud causes havoc with the climate and thwarts the attempts of scientists to both study it and attack it. Gradually the scientists come to realize that the cloud is an intelligence unlike any they have encountered. They are finally successful in communicating with the cloud and realize that its intelligence is conveyed by electrical impulses moving inside it. The cloud and the humans finally part on peaceful terms. There are two particularly interesting aspects of the cloud that warrant further attention. One is that it’s surprised to find intelligence on a solid planet; it is used to intelligence being gaseous. The second is that it’s surprised to find intelligence concentrated in individual human minds; it is used to intelligence constantly moving around. The reason these aspects of the story are interesting is because they show that Hoyle was ahead of his time and was already thinking about forms of intelligence and life that we have barely scratched the surface of. Our intelligence is locked up in a three pound mass of wet solid matter. And it’s a result of the development of the central nervous system. The central nervous system was one of the great innovations in the history of life. It allowed organisms to concentrate their energy and information-processing power in a single mass that sent out tentacles communicating with the rest of the body. The tentacles are important but the preponderance of the brain’s capability resides in itself, in a single organ that cannot be detached or disassembled and moved around. From dolphins to tigers and from bonobos to humans, we find the same basic plan existing for good reasons. The central nervous system is an example of what’s called convergent evolution, which refers to the ability of evolution to find the same solutions for complex problems. Especially in Homo sapiens, the central nervous system and the consequent development of the neocortex are seen as the crowning glory of human evolution. And yet it’s the solutions that escaped the general plan that are the most interesting in a sense. Throughout the animal and plant kingdom we find examples not of central but of distributed intelligence, like Hoyle’s cloud. Octopuses are particular fascinating examples. They can smell and touch and understand not just through their conspicuous brains but through their tentacles; they are even thought to “see” color through these appendages. But to find the ultimate examples of distributed intelligence, it might be prudent not to look at earth’s most conspicuous and popular examples of life but its most obscure – fungi. Communicating the wonders of distributed intelligence through the story of fungi is what Merlin Sheldrake accomplishes in his book, “Entangled Life”. Fungi have always been our silent partners, partners that are much more like us than we can imagine. Like bacteria they are involved in an immense number of activities that both aid and harm human beings, but most interestingly, fungi unlike bacteria are eukaryotes and are therefore, counterintuitively, evolutionarily closer to us rather than to their superficially similar counterparts. And they get as close to us as we can imagine. Penicillin is famously produced by a fungus; so is the antibiotic fluconazole that is used to kill other fungal infections. Fungal infections can be deadly; Aspergillus forms clumps in the lungs that can rapidly kill patients by spreading through the bloodstream. Fungi of course charm purveyors of gastronomic delights everywhere in the world as mushrooms, and they also charm purveyors of olfactory delights as truffles; a small lump can easily sell for five thousand dollars. Last but not the least, fungi have taken millions of humans into other worlds and artistic explosions of colors and sight by inducing hallucinations. With this diverse list of vivid qualities, it may seem odd that perhaps the most interesting quality of fungi lies not in what we can see but what we can’t. Mushrooms may grace dinner plates in restaurants and homes around the world, but they are merely the fruiting bodies of fungi. They may be visible as clear vials of life-saving drugs in hospitals. But as Sheldrake describes in loving detail, the most important parts of the fungi are hidden below the ground. These are the vast networks of the fungal mycelium – the sheer, gossamer, thread-like structure snaking its way through forests and hills, sometimes spreading over hundreds of square miles, occasionally being as old as the neolithic revolution, all out of sight of most human beings and visible only to the one entity with which it has forged an unbreakable, intimate alliance – trees. Dig a little deep into a tree root and put it under a microscope and your will find wisps of what seem like even smaller roots, except that these roots penetrate into the trees roots. The wisps are fungal mycelium. They are everywhere; around roots, under them, over them and inside them. At first glance the the ability of fungal networks to penetrate inside tree roots might evoke pain and invoke images of an unholy literal physical union of two species. It’s certainly...