Overview
Sheldrake, a British biologist who did his doctoral work on underground fungal networks in Panama, explores the remarkable biology of fungi — an entire kingdom of life that is neither plant nor animal and which underlies much of the living world.
Sheldrake comes from an unusual intellectual lineage — his father is the controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake — but has built his own reputation as a careful field researcher. Entangled Life, published in 2020, was a surprise breakout bestseller and won the Royal Society Science Book Prize. Sheldrake's attempt to read his own book while growing oyster mushrooms on the pages went viral.
Key Ideas
Fungi are everywhere
From mycorrhizal networks in soil to the yeasts on your skin, fungi are foundational to ecosystems.
The wood-wide web
Plants communicate and share resources through fungal networks in ways that complicate simple competitive models of biology.
Lichens are composite organisms
Lichens are partnerships of fungi and algae (and sometimes bacteria), blurring the idea of what counts as an individual.
Cognition without brains
Fungi solve spatial puzzles and 'choose' pathways in ways that pressure our concept of intelligence.
Psychedelic fungi
Sheldrake treats psilocybin research seriously without sensationalising it, as part of the broader picture of fungal biology.
Who should read this
Readers who want natural-history writing that changes how they see the ground they walk on. Especially valuable for readers tired of animal-centric biology — fungi are both stranger and more foundational than most textbooks suggest.
Who might skip it
Skip if you want a conservative treatment — Sheldrake takes seriously questions (does mycelium display something like cognition?) that some biologists find speculative. Skip also if you find lyrical science writing distracting.
The verdict
One of the most genuinely surprising science books I have read in the last five years. Sheldrake is that rare thing: a working scientist who writes beautifully and is willing to sit with uncertainty about what his own data mean. The chapter on lichens is the clearest piece of writing about symbiosis I know.
Fungi make up a kingdom of life all their own, distinct from animals and plants. They live in a world of their own and have their own ways of being in it.
— Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
If you liked this
An Immense World by Ed Yong for the sensory-worlds companion. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben for the pop-science precursor.