There was something embarrassing about admitting that the tangle of our unfounded conjectures, fantasies, and metaphors might have helped shape our research.

Biology—the study of living organisms—had transformed into ecology—the study of the relationships between living organisms.

Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life.

You carry around more microbes than your “own” cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy.

According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table—a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or

What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.

At a molecular level, fungi and humans are similar enough to benefit from many of the same biochemical innovations.

Unsustainable agricultural practices reduce the ability of plants to form relationships with the beneficial fungi on which they depend. The widespread use of antifungal chemicals has led to an unprecedented rise in new fungal superbugs that threaten both human and plant health. As humans disperse disease-causing fungi, we create new opportunities

Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.