Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
Overview
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (2020) by Merlin Sheldrake is one of the most important works of popular science of the early twenty-first century — not because it simplifies, but because it refuses to. Drawing on his doctoral research at Cambridge University and years of fieldwork in Panamanian rainforests, Sheldrake constructs a portrait of fungi so philosophically disorienting that it calls into question what we mean by organism, individual, intelligence, and life. The book is also a meditation on entanglement itself: on the impossibility of thinking alone, of acting without being acted upon, of being without becoming-with.
Merlin Sheldrake. Source: merlinsheldrake.com
1. The Author and His Method
Merlin Sheldrake (born 1987) is a biologist and writer with a PhD in tropical ecology from Cambridge University, son of the controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake and godson of Terence McKenna — a biographical detail that is, for once, genuinely relevant to understanding the texture of his thinking. His research has focused on underground fungal networks in tropical forests, but Entangled Life is far more than a report from the field.
The book’s method is itself fungal. It proceeds not linearly but rhizomatically, looping back, digressing, branching. Sheldrake moves between cutting-edge mycology, philosophy of mind, ecology, biochemistry, and personal experience with an ease that never collapses into pop-science glossiness. He is rigorous without being airless. Crucially, he resists the temptation to resolve the problems he raises: the book’s animating tension — what is a fungus? what is an individual? — is never tidied away.
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life (2020)
“Fungi are not just a feature of the world. In a crucial sense, they are the world — or at least, they are what holds much of the living world together, what decomposes and what renews, what connects and what creates.”
2. Structure and Scope
Entangled Life is organized around a series of fungal phenomena, each of which opens onto a larger philosophical and ecological question:
- Mycorrhizal Networks — How trees communicate, exchange nutrients, and cooperate through underground fungal webs
- Lichens — The most extreme case of symbiosis: an organism that is, fundamentally, a relationship
- Cordyceps and Behavioral Manipulation — Fungi that take over the bodies and minds of insects, raising profound questions about agency and autonomy
- Psilocybin and Consciousness — The neurochemistry and philosophy of the psychedelic experience
- Fermentation and Transformation — Fungi as the agents of bread, alcohol, cheese — the foundations of human civilization
- Decomposition and Renewal — The radical importance of rot: without fungal decomposition, life would collapse under its own organic weight
Each chapter is simultaneously a lesson in biology and a philosophical provocation.
3. Mycorrhizal Networks: The Wood Wide Web
The book’s most publicly debated territory is the so-called wood wide web : the dense mycorrhizal networks through which trees and plants exchange sugars, water, phosphorus, and chemical signals. This is not metaphor — it is established science. What Sheldrake does brilliantly is resist the rush to over-interpret it.
Cross-section of an arbuscular mycorrhiza showing fungal structures inside a plant root cell — the literal interface where nutrient exchange occurs. Source: Wikimedia Commons
He engages carefully with both the science and its cultural reception — noting how the mycorrhizal network has been seized by popular culture as proof that “trees communicate” or that “forests are communists,” while the underlying science is more ambiguous, more interesting. Fungi are not altruists; the networks are not purely cooperative; “trade” and “exploitation” coexist with “mutualism” in the same underground web. The fungal network does not prove that nature is non-competitive — it shows that competition and cooperation are not opposites but entangled dimensions of the same system.
Scientific Caution
Sheldrake himself flags the risk of overfitting political metaphors onto mycorrhizal science. The “wood wide web” concept, while real, has been simplified in popular discourse. Not all tree-to-tree transfers are “communication” in any robust sense; the science of network “fairness” is still contested. The book is valuable precisely because it holds this tension open rather than resolving it in a politically convenient direction. See the related note in Mycology in Contemporary Social, Political, and Philosophical Practices.
This scientific honesty makes Entangled Life a better philosophical text than if it had simply confirmed our ecological fantasies. The mycorrhizal network matters not because it is a utopia underground, but because it forces us to rethink what relation means, what exchange means, what boundary means.
4. Lichens and the Problem of the Individual
Perhaps the most philosophically rich section of the book concerns lichens. A lichen is neither a fungus nor an alga nor a cyanobacterium: it is the relationship between them. The organism is the symbiosis.
Lobaria pulmonaria, a foliose lichen — an organism constituted entirely by its symbiotic relationships. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Sheldrake traces the history of lichenology from the nineteenth century, when the discovery that lichens were composite organisms was considered so scandalous that the botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary struggled to have it accepted. The resistance was not merely scientific — it was ideological. The idea that a successful, resilient life-form could be, at its most fundamental level, a collaboration between radically different kinds of organism challenged the Darwinian framework of competitive individual units.
Contemporary lichenology has pushed this further: recent research suggests that lichens may involve not two but three or more partners — including bacteria living within the fungal cortex. The “individual” of the lichen dissolves on inspection into an ecology.
Sheldrake uses this to devastating effect against Western philosophical concepts of selfhood:
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life (2020)
“If a lichen is not one or two organisms but an ongoing negotiation between partners — then perhaps what we call ‘individuals’ are always, already, processes of entanglement rather than units that later enter into relations.”
This resonates directly with the philosophical frameworks explored in Mycology in Contemporary Social, Political, and Philosophical Practices — particularly the posthumanist tradition associated with Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis (“making-together,” as opposed to autopoiesis , self-making) and the New Materialism’s critique of bounded individuality.
5. Distributed Cognition: Intelligence Without a Brain
One of Entangled Life ’s most radical propositions is that fungi are, in a meaningful sense, cognitive agents — despite having no nervous system, no brain, no centralized processing whatsoever.
Sheldrake reviews experiments showing that mycelial networks solve mazes, optimize paths between resources, and respond adaptively to novel environments — behaviors that, in animals, we would not hesitate to call problem-solving. He is careful not to anthropomorphize; he does not claim fungi “think” in any human sense. Instead, he uses fungal cognition as a lever to pry open the concept of intelligence itself.
If intelligence can be distributed across a network, emergent from local interactions without central coordination, then intelligence is not a property of a kind of entity (animals, humans) but of a kind of organization. This connects to debates in Philosophy of Mind around extended cognition and enactivism — the view, associated with Andy Clark, Francisco Varela, and Evan Thompson, that cognition is not confined to the skull but distributed across body, environment, and relation.
Mycelium is, in Sheldrake’s framing, a biological instantiation of the extended mind thesis.
Mycelium network on decaying wood — the distributed “cognitive” architecture that processes and responds to its environment without any central processor. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The philosophical implications are significant. If distributed, acentralized processing counts as a form of intelligence, then:
- The boundary between “intelligent” and “non-intelligent” life becomes unstable.
- The model of the brain as the seat of intelligence becomes a parochial case rather than the universal type.
- Political and ethical frameworks that reserve full moral consideration for the intelligent (however defined) are challenged at their foundations.
This connects directly to the post-anthropocentric arguments developed through fungal thinking in the tradition of Anna Tsing and to the rhizomatic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, for whom distributed, horizontal, acephalous thought was a political as well as ontological ideal.
6. Cordyceps: Agency, Parasitism, and the Limits of Self
The Cordyceps chapter is the book’s most unsettling. Ophiocordyceps fungi infect ants, manipulate their behavior with remarkable precision — forcing them to climb to an exact height before clamping onto a leaf vein with their mandibles — and then kill them, fruiting through the ant’s head to disperse spores.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fruiting from an infected ant — one of the most extreme examples of fungal behavioral manipulation. Source: Wikimedia Commons
What makes Sheldrake’s treatment exceptional is that he does not treat this as merely horrifying. He asks: if a fungus can produce behavior in an animal body as precisely as any “authentic” behavioral impulse — if the ant’s final climb is indistinguishable from a voluntarily executed action — what does this reveal about the relationship between organism and behavior, between self and what acts through us?
The question is not idle: human behavior is also shaped by organisms we host. The gut microbiome influences mood, anxiety, appetite, and cognition through the gut-brain axis. We are not, and have never been, the sole authors of our behavior. The Cartesian model of a unified rational subject governing a body from the inside is, in this light, a fantasy. We are, like the parasitized ant, the temporary stage upon which multiple agencies act.
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life (2020)
“We like to think of ourselves as the authors of our lives. But we are, at least in part, the authors of nothing — or rather, we are always collaborative authors, whether we know it or not.”
7. Psilocybin, Consciousness, and the Dissolution of the Self
The chapter on psilocybin is among the book’s finest. Sheldrake approaches psychedelic mushrooms with neither the breathless enthusiasm of the counterculture nor the defensive skepticism of conventional pharmacology, but as a mycologist genuinely puzzled by the question: why would a fungus produce a compound that profoundly alters mammalian consciousness?
The honest answer is that no one knows. The compound may be a byproduct, a defense mechanism, an artifact of an evolutionary arms race. Or it may be something stranger — a chemical that, through millions of years of coevolution, has shaped the very neurochemistry that psilocybin now modifies.
Psilocybe semilanceata (liberty cap) — a naturally occurring psilocybin-containing mushroom with a long history of human use. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Sheldrake reviews the resurgent clinical research on psilocybin — its remarkable efficacy in treating depression, addiction, end-of-life anxiety — and the leading neurological hypothesis: psilocybin reduces activity in the Default Mode Network (DMN), the brain network associated with rumination, self-referential thought, and the narrative self. The experience of “ego dissolution” that many users report is, in this framework, the experience of the DMN going quiet — of the constructed self temporarily losing its monopoly on experience.
The philosophical implication that Sheldrake draws is elegant and unsettling: psilocybin produces, through pharmacological means, an experiential understanding of what mycorrhizal biology demonstrates structurally — that the self is not a fixed unit but a provisional, constructed, porous process. The mushroom dissolves, experientially, what the mycelium dissolves, ontologically.
For the connections between psilocybin, indigenous knowledge, and the politics of the psychedelic renaissance — including concerns about pharmacological colonialism and epistemological sovereignty — see Mycology in Contemporary Social, Political, and Philosophical Practices, section 7.
8. Decomposition as Philosophy
The final movement of the book concerns decomposition — fungi as the great undoers, the entities that break down organic matter and return it to circulation. Without decomposers, life would accumulate into inert mass: coal exists because for millions of years, no organism had evolved the capacity to digest lignin. Fungi eventually did. The Carboniferous period ended, in part, because fungi learned to eat wood.
Sheldrake treats decomposition not as an ending but as a transformation — the condition of possibility for new life. This is, he acknowledges, close to a philosophical position as much as a biological one. The willingness to think seriously about rot and dissolution — against the cultural preference for growth, accumulation, solidity — connects the book to broader currents in Degrowth thought, Solarpunk aesthetics, and the ecological humanities.
It also connects to his own practice: the book famously ends with Sheldrake burying a copy of Entangled Life in garden soil and leaving fungi to digest it — a gesture that is at once poetic, philosophical, and genuinely funny.
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life (2020)
“I eat, therefore I am. But so do fungi. The question is what happens when you take the eating seriously — when you follow the decomposition all the way down.”
9. Philosophical Resonances
9.1 Haraway and Sympoiesis
Entangled Life is in sustained, if sometimes implicit, dialogue with Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016). Where Haraway coined sympoiesis (making-together) to replace the self-making logic of autopoiesis, Sheldrake demonstrates sympoiesis at the molecular level: there is no fungal life that is not always already a making-together with plants, bacteria, animals, soils.
9.2 Tsing and Multispecies Worlds
Anna Tsing’s multispecies ethnography and the concept of Polyphonic Assemblages find in Entangled Life their biological grounding. Where Tsing shows how human worlds are constituted through multispecies entanglement at the economic and social level, Sheldrake shows the same at the cellular and biochemical level. The two books are natural companions — see Mycology in Contemporary Social, Political, and Philosophical Practices, section 2.
9.3 Deleuze, Guattari, and the Rhizome
The rhizome concept from A Thousand Plateaus (1980) — horizontal, multiple, acephalous, resistant to centralization — is made literal by Sheldrake’s mycelium. Sheldrake does not cite Deleuze and Guattari extensively, but the resonance is structurally present throughout the book: mycelium is the rhizome, biologically instantiated. See the philosophical frameworks section in Mycology in Contemporary Social, Political, and Philosophical Practices, section 9.
9.4 New Materialism and Post-Anthropocentrism
Entangled Life is one of the most effective popular contributions to what is broadly called New Materialism — the philosophical tendency associated with Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, and Rosi Braidotti that insists on the agency, liveliness, and relational constitution of matter itself. Fungi, in Sheldrake’s account, are lively matter par excellence: they act, respond, transform, communicate, and refuse the passivity that Western philosophy has typically assigned to the non-human world.
10. Reception and Impact
Entangled Life won the Royal Society Science Book Prize (2021) and the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation. It was a bestseller in the UK and the United States, and has been translated into over thirty languages. Its impact has been felt well beyond science: the book is regularly assigned in philosophy, ecology, and humanities courses, and has directly influenced practitioners in mycoremediation, regenerative agriculture, and ecological art.
The book accelerated what scholars have described as the “fungal turn” in popular and academic culture — joining Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind as texts that repositioned fungi from biological curiosity to cultural and philosophical protagonist. It is also one of the texts most cited in the emerging literature on the Radical Mycology movement.
11. Complementary Resources
Books
- Anna Tsing,The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton UP, 2015) — multispecies ethnography of the matsutake mushroom as guide through capitalist ruins. Essential companion. See Mycology in Contemporary Social, Political, and Philosophical Practices.
- Michael Pollan,How to Change Your Mind (Penguin, 2018) — the definitive popular account of the psychedelic renaissance; complements Sheldrake’s psilocybin chapter in depth and narrative range.
- Peter McCoy,Radical Mycology: A Treatise on Seeing and Working With Fungi (Chthaeus Press, 2016) — the activist and philosophical companion to Sheldrake’s science; less literary, more practical and political.
- Donna Haraway,Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke UP, 2016) — the philosophical framework within which Sheldrake’s biology makes its deepest sense.
- Robin Wall Kimmerer,Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013) — indigenous botanical knowledge and reciprocal ecology; shares Sheldrake’s attentiveness to plant and fungal intelligence from a different epistemological tradition.
- Lynn Margulis,Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (Basic Books, 1998) — the foundational scientific argument that symbiosis, not competition, is evolution’s primary engine; Sheldrake’s intellectual ancestor.
- Andy Clark,Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (MIT Press, 1997) — extended mind thesis; philosophical grounding for the distributed cognition arguments.
Articles and Papers
- Suzanne Simard et al., “Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field” (Nature , 1997) — the landmark paper that first established tree-to-tree carbon transfer via mycorrhizal networks.
- Mapping Alternative Futures through Fungi: The Usefulness of Mycorrhizal Networks as a Metaphor for Mutual Aid — directly extends Sheldrake’s biology into political philosophy.
- Toby Kiers et al., “Mycorrhizal networks are not altruistic” (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2016) — important scientific counterpoint; fungi exploit as well as cooperate.
- Robin Carhart-Harris et al., “Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin” (PNAS , 2012) — the Default Mode Network research behind Sheldrake’s psilocybin chapter.
Films and Documentaries
- Fantastic Fungi (dir. Louie Schwartzberg, 2019) — Sheldrake appears in this visually stunning documentary alongside Paul Stamets; the most accessible visual companion to Entangled Life.
- The Kingdom: How Fungi Made Our World (ABC Australia, 2019) — excellent scientific overview with strong coverage of mycorrhizal networks and ecological significance.
- Merlin Sheldrake in conversation with Radiolab — a superb audio exploration of the book’s key ideas, focused on the communication question.
Lectures and Online Resources
- Merlin Sheldrake — “Entangled Life” lecture at the Long Now Foundation (2021) — an essential 90-minute lecture expanding the book’s key arguments.
- Merlin Sheldrake’s official website — includes essays, interviews, and supplementary materials.
- Sheldrake’s interview with Krista Tippett, On Being — “The Intelligence of Fungi”; one of the best conversations on the philosophical implications.
- Paul Stamets: “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World” — TED Talk (2008) — the mycoremediation context; Stamets is Sheldrake’s closest intellectual ally in the mycology advocacy space.
External Links
- Merlin Sheldrake — Official Website
- Entangled Life at Random House
- Royal Society Science Book Prize 2021 — Announcement
- Fantastic Fungi — Official Site
- Long Now Foundation lecture — Merlin Sheldrake
- On Being interview: “The Intelligence of Fungi”
- Wikimedia Commons — Fungi category
See Also
- Mycology in Contemporary Social, Political, and Philosophical Practices
Discussion in the ATmosphere