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silverflight8Two non-fiction books which I had very different reactions to.
Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake
This book is ostensibly about fungi, that whole kingdom of life, and its many varied forms and its relationship to humans. What this book actually is about is Merlin Sheldrake's personal anecdotes about getting high, getting drunk, ramblings about the one-ness of the world and the blurring of the barriers between the
I should preface that I am not a biologist. However, I was hoping for something about fungi and its structure, the niches it occupies, evolutionary phylogeny, maybe some discussion about its diversity and some general classification, and so on. Unfortunately there really wasn't much solid information at all. Most of the book was about general philosophical musings about us and mushrooms.
Several other things irritated me too. One especially glaring was that it felt like Sheldrake always seemed to cherrypick his examples to suit his message, which every author has to (no one can be comprehensive, being selective is part of the job) but which felt slightly dishonest. He focuses very strongly on the message that mushrooms are awesome, man, and there's a lot of focus on the fungi and our relationship to them, especially as psychedelics and entheogens. But if you want to talk a lot about how we relate to them, why does he skip the entire category of dangerous mushrooms, like the other Amanita mushrooms, which are extremely famous for their very deadly properties, and the many colourful and well-known names (death cap! destroying angel!) we have given them in plain English. Instead he goes on about Amanita muscaria (inedible but hallucinogenic) extensively, and also about his personal experience of being on mushrooms, his thoughts on how he feels that the barrier between self and other is blurred and gone. Perhaps it's my never-having-taken-magic-mushrooms bias, but honestly, reading reams of this just feels like reading witterings of someone who hasn't bothered to edit himself - like getting trapped into conversation with the intense but boring guy at a party who really wants to tell you about his drug trip in detail, but unfortunately you don't care. And I did not care. There is probably a whole category of memoir/semi-fictional books that have been written about experiences like this, and I am sure lots of good art and literature can be made out of it, but that is not at all what I signed up for.
I don't have the background to determine if his cherrypicking of the information is genuinely misleading, but I do know this: that effective remedies tend to be targeted, and when someone comes to me saying that one thing can be a cure-all, he's probably a snake-oil salesman. I guess that's the danger of monographs on one subject - Sheldrake wouldn't write this book if he wasn't very into mushrooms and also seeing everything through a mushroom lens, but I am unconvinced by what he's presented. There is so much wild speculation of what fungi could do, off the back of some very prosaic details. Most authors save this for the end of the book!
There is a tremendous amount of information we don't know about fungi and I totally agree, but Sheldrake never offers up competing hypotheses or multiple viewpoints on something we don't know. Instead he'll give one or just say "we don't know" several different ways. It's ok to say we don't know, but say it once and then move on, or lay out what we do know and move on.
I know it's out of style for pop science but I really wish that there were footnotes or endnotes. There's actually an extensive bibliography in the back, but no specific references in-text.
Compounding this was that the book was not very well organized. I think it could have done with some more editing - Sheldrake tends to go round and round a subject for several pages, but never actually gets down to more detail or exploration. The parts about the root communication system that exists between plants, partly mediated by fungi, seems to go on for so many pages and yet just re-iterates the same points: it's cool, fungi can decide where nutrients go, it's cool, it's fungally mediated, it's cool, etc. And it kept going on.
Finally one thing that irritated me to an extra degree was the last anecdote at the end of the book. He talks about how he went on a tour of the Cambridge Botanical Gardens, where apparently they had taken a cutting and planted an apple tree connected to Newton; he digresses into some discussion of how the story of the apple and gravity are almost certainly made up, etc, but we still have little things like this where tour guides point such things out. Fine. He asks the director of the garden (who was guiding him around) if he could take an apple, and is told no, because there are other people who come to see the tree. So Sheldrake sneaks back after dark and steals a whole bunch of apples - not one but most of them, he says; and enough to press into juice and ferment into cider. The whole thing is presented as this cheeky, smug, we're so cool, "cider was drunk into community spirit" (actual quote). Sure, I'm a stick in the mud, but when someone politely asks me to not pick the flowers so others can enjoy, I don't pick the flowers, because I understand that I am not actually the center of the universe and others should be able to enjoy the spring blooms. You could pick apples anywhere else and ferment it into community spirit! Pick the apples off the side of the road, that would suit you thematically better too! I understand doing this as a message and as an action against someone who did you wrong - what on earth did Cambridge Botanical Gardens do wrong against you, except to make beautiful gardens available to anyone who wanted to visit? Honestly, this last incident, related in such a pleased-with-himself-way, really rubbed me the wrong way.
(Also, there's an underlying current I cannot help but feel, which is that Sheldrake feels entitled to flout these kinds of rules because of who he is: someone who will always be treated with leniency by law enforcement. If he is found possessing illegal drugs, growing them illicitly, or trespassing and stealing, he's not going to be shot dead. He'll get off without any problems.)
On a last note, however, I discovered Merlin Sheldrake's father is Rupert Sheldrake, and after having read some of what's in that article, I actually find myself respecting Merlin slightly more. I won't recap the article, but Merlin is tedious and not as interesting as he thinks he is, he needs way more editing, but at least he's still based on this planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction - George McGhee
This book was a lot more enjoyable and insightful. It covers the late Devonian extinctions (about 370 million years ago), through the Carboniferous and Permian, ending with (of course) the terrifying end-Permian extinction.
I found this interesting and sometimes dense to read. I am never going to be a geologist and honestly sometimes when McGhee was describing glacial interpulses I had to really work on focusing, but you can't really understand paleontology without at least a little geology - the history of the past is encoded in rocks! - and there was genuinely a lot of scholarship and information presented.
McGhee presented information at the granularity of Stages, so instead of talking about Devonian, or late Devonian, he would refer to the Frasnian stage. I have memorized the GTS down to the periods/epochs, but this was tricky and I kept flipping back and forth between the text and the tables showing the names of the stages, the years it covered, oxygen levels, glacial coverage, etc. I can see why, though - the stages cover around somewhere from a few million to a dozen million years, which is yes a lot of time, but not as much as say the period (fifty, eighty million years) and allows discussion about what the climate was like for that specific chunk of time in fairly fine detail.
There is a lot of discussion of the suspected mechanisms of the many extinctions covered - this period of time has several mass extinctions, including the most devastating/famous one at the end of the Permian, which were interesting. I like McGhee's specificity, in naming representative or illustrative species representing typical life forms filling this niche. He also in-text would cite specific scientists from x institution who had researched this specific item and what their conclusions had been. When talking about the Carboniferous and its famous high-oxygen atmosphere, he lists two competing (geologic) models and examines how well they explain the biologic (paleontological) evidence, for example, looking at arthropod gigantism and when we can reasonably infer when it began or became untenable.
The end of the Devonian is when tetrapods start appearing, and of course (as a tetrapod myself) it's really interesting. McGhee talks a lot about the lycopod rainforests of the Carboniferous, which I also enjoyed, gigantism in arthropods, and then the massive size of the eruptions that probably ended the Permian. He presents a lot of different hypotheses for the end-Permian extinction, mostly effects building off the frankly astonishing volcanic eruptions which came out of Siberia.
At the end of the book McGhee does more speculative writing, which was interesting to think about. Two things that stuck with me - one, that the coal laid down by the Carboniferous represent a tiny slice of time, about 10%, but represent overwhelmingly all the coal we have ever dug up, and which has fuelled a massive change in how almost everyone lives today. McGhee speculates whether this Industrial Revolution would have happened at all - wood, after all, is much less dense and it's much harder to harness for the high energy you need to work steel, etc etc. Would we have gotten there eventually? Who knows.
The other thing I thought was interesting was about lobe-finned fish and their rarity and therefore our encounters with them. Almost all fish are ray-finned (actinopterygii), which are sister clade. Ray-finned fish are really really diverse and numerous, and they have fins supported by thin spines which attach directly to their bodies. But we are descended from lobe-finned fish, and so do birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Lobe-finned fishes don't have fins attached directly to their bodies - they have this bone (thus the lobe, the fleshy thing) between. Lobe-finned fishes were formerly very diverse, but almost all of the closer relations between tetrapods and the lungfish/coelacanths are all extinct, many during these major Paleozoic extinctions covered by this book. McGhee wonders if it would be so hard to understand and accept the knowledge we are likely closely related to lobe-finned fishes if, when we went fishing, we always hauled up these fish with stumpy little lobes; if when we went to buy a fish for dinner, we would cut it up to butcher and would see the little bones attaching the fins to the body, so much more like us than the fins of ray-finned fish that we commonly see and encounter today. What we think of as "right" and "natural" comes from what we see often and what we are accustomed to, after all. It's an interesting thought experiment. Looking through deep time is picking out what happened from fragmentary evidence - looking at what survived means trying to see the picture with many very big holes in it. The many extinctions of nearer kin that might have descended along with us to modern day (of course changing themselves) make the gulf between tetrapods and lungfish today seem yawningly huge.
Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake
This book is ostensibly about fungi, that whole kingdom of life, and its many varied forms and its relationship to humans. What this book actually is about is Merlin Sheldrake's personal anecdotes about getting high, getting drunk, ramblings about the one-ness of the world and the blurring of the barriers between the
I should preface that I am not a biologist. However, I was hoping for something about fungi and its structure, the niches it occupies, evolutionary phylogeny, maybe some discussion about its diversity and some general classification, and so on. Unfortunately there really wasn't much solid information at all. Most of the book was about general philosophical musings about us and mushrooms.
Several other things irritated me too. One especially glaring was that it felt like Sheldrake always seemed to cherrypick his examples to suit his message, which every author has to (no one can be comprehensive, being selective is part of the job) but which felt slightly dishonest. He focuses very strongly on the message that mushrooms are awesome, man, and there's a lot of focus on the fungi and our relationship to them, especially as psychedelics and entheogens. But if you want to talk a lot about how we relate to them, why does he skip the entire category of dangerous mushrooms, like the other Amanita mushrooms, which are extremely famous for their very deadly properties, and the many colourful and well-known names (death cap! destroying angel!) we have given them in plain English. Instead he goes on about Amanita muscaria (inedible but hallucinogenic) extensively, and also about his personal experience of being on mushrooms, his thoughts on how he feels that the barrier between self and other is blurred and gone. Perhaps it's my never-having-taken-magic-mushrooms bias, but honestly, reading reams of this just feels like reading witterings of someone who hasn't bothered to edit himself - like getting trapped into conversation with the intense but boring guy at a party who really wants to tell you about his drug trip in detail, but unfortunately you don't care. And I did not care. There is probably a whole category of memoir/semi-fictional books that have been written about experiences like this, and I am sure lots of good art and literature can be made out of it, but that is not at all what I signed up for.
I don't have the background to determine if his cherrypicking of the information is genuinely misleading, but I do know this: that effective remedies tend to be targeted, and when someone comes to me saying that one thing can be a cure-all, he's probably a snake-oil salesman. I guess that's the danger of monographs on one subject - Sheldrake wouldn't write this book if he wasn't very into mushrooms and also seeing everything through a mushroom lens, but I am unconvinced by what he's presented. There is so much wild speculation of what fungi could do, off the back of some very prosaic details. Most authors save this for the end of the book!
There is a tremendous amount of information we don't know about fungi and I totally agree, but Sheldrake never offers up competing hypotheses or multiple viewpoints on something we don't know. Instead he'll give one or just say "we don't know" several different ways. It's ok to say we don't know, but say it once and then move on, or lay out what we do know and move on.
I know it's out of style for pop science but I really wish that there were footnotes or endnotes. There's actually an extensive bibliography in the back, but no specific references in-text.
Compounding this was that the book was not very well organized. I think it could have done with some more editing - Sheldrake tends to go round and round a subject for several pages, but never actually gets down to more detail or exploration. The parts about the root communication system that exists between plants, partly mediated by fungi, seems to go on for so many pages and yet just re-iterates the same points: it's cool, fungi can decide where nutrients go, it's cool, it's fungally mediated, it's cool, etc. And it kept going on.
Finally one thing that irritated me to an extra degree was the last anecdote at the end of the book. He talks about how he went on a tour of the Cambridge Botanical Gardens, where apparently they had taken a cutting and planted an apple tree connected to Newton; he digresses into some discussion of how the story of the apple and gravity are almost certainly made up, etc, but we still have little things like this where tour guides point such things out. Fine. He asks the director of the garden (who was guiding him around) if he could take an apple, and is told no, because there are other people who come to see the tree. So Sheldrake sneaks back after dark and steals a whole bunch of apples - not one but most of them, he says; and enough to press into juice and ferment into cider. The whole thing is presented as this cheeky, smug, we're so cool, "cider was drunk into community spirit" (actual quote). Sure, I'm a stick in the mud, but when someone politely asks me to not pick the flowers so others can enjoy, I don't pick the flowers, because I understand that I am not actually the center of the universe and others should be able to enjoy the spring blooms. You could pick apples anywhere else and ferment it into community spirit! Pick the apples off the side of the road, that would suit you thematically better too! I understand doing this as a message and as an action against someone who did you wrong - what on earth did Cambridge Botanical Gardens do wrong against you, except to make beautiful gardens available to anyone who wanted to visit? Honestly, this last incident, related in such a pleased-with-himself-way, really rubbed me the wrong way.
(Also, there's an underlying current I cannot help but feel, which is that Sheldrake feels entitled to flout these kinds of rules because of who he is: someone who will always be treated with leniency by law enforcement. If he is found possessing illegal drugs, growing them illicitly, or trespassing and stealing, he's not going to be shot dead. He'll get off without any problems.)
On a last note, however, I discovered Merlin Sheldrake's father is Rupert Sheldrake, and after having read some of what's in that article, I actually find myself respecting Merlin slightly more. I won't recap the article, but Merlin is tedious and not as interesting as he thinks he is, he needs way more editing, but at least he's still based on this planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction - George McGhee
This book was a lot more enjoyable and insightful. It covers the late Devonian extinctions (about 370 million years ago), through the Carboniferous and Permian, ending with (of course) the terrifying end-Permian extinction.
I found this interesting and sometimes dense to read. I am never going to be a geologist and honestly sometimes when McGhee was describing glacial interpulses I had to really work on focusing, but you can't really understand paleontology without at least a little geology - the history of the past is encoded in rocks! - and there was genuinely a lot of scholarship and information presented.
McGhee presented information at the granularity of Stages, so instead of talking about Devonian, or late Devonian, he would refer to the Frasnian stage. I have memorized the GTS down to the periods/epochs, but this was tricky and I kept flipping back and forth between the text and the tables showing the names of the stages, the years it covered, oxygen levels, glacial coverage, etc. I can see why, though - the stages cover around somewhere from a few million to a dozen million years, which is yes a lot of time, but not as much as say the period (fifty, eighty million years) and allows discussion about what the climate was like for that specific chunk of time in fairly fine detail.
There is a lot of discussion of the suspected mechanisms of the many extinctions covered - this period of time has several mass extinctions, including the most devastating/famous one at the end of the Permian, which were interesting. I like McGhee's specificity, in naming representative or illustrative species representing typical life forms filling this niche. He also in-text would cite specific scientists from x institution who had researched this specific item and what their conclusions had been. When talking about the Carboniferous and its famous high-oxygen atmosphere, he lists two competing (geologic) models and examines how well they explain the biologic (paleontological) evidence, for example, looking at arthropod gigantism and when we can reasonably infer when it began or became untenable.
The end of the Devonian is when tetrapods start appearing, and of course (as a tetrapod myself) it's really interesting. McGhee talks a lot about the lycopod rainforests of the Carboniferous, which I also enjoyed, gigantism in arthropods, and then the massive size of the eruptions that probably ended the Permian. He presents a lot of different hypotheses for the end-Permian extinction, mostly effects building off the frankly astonishing volcanic eruptions which came out of Siberia.
At the end of the book McGhee does more speculative writing, which was interesting to think about. Two things that stuck with me - one, that the coal laid down by the Carboniferous represent a tiny slice of time, about 10%, but represent overwhelmingly all the coal we have ever dug up, and which has fuelled a massive change in how almost everyone lives today. McGhee speculates whether this Industrial Revolution would have happened at all - wood, after all, is much less dense and it's much harder to harness for the high energy you need to work steel, etc etc. Would we have gotten there eventually? Who knows.
The other thing I thought was interesting was about lobe-finned fish and their rarity and therefore our encounters with them. Almost all fish are ray-finned (actinopterygii), which are sister clade. Ray-finned fish are really really diverse and numerous, and they have fins supported by thin spines which attach directly to their bodies. But we are descended from lobe-finned fish, and so do birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Lobe-finned fishes don't have fins attached directly to their bodies - they have this bone (thus the lobe, the fleshy thing) between. Lobe-finned fishes were formerly very diverse, but almost all of the closer relations between tetrapods and the lungfish/coelacanths are all extinct, many during these major Paleozoic extinctions covered by this book. McGhee wonders if it would be so hard to understand and accept the knowledge we are likely closely related to lobe-finned fishes if, when we went fishing, we always hauled up these fish with stumpy little lobes; if when we went to buy a fish for dinner, we would cut it up to butcher and would see the little bones attaching the fins to the body, so much more like us than the fins of ray-finned fish that we commonly see and encounter today. What we think of as "right" and "natural" comes from what we see often and what we are accustomed to, after all. It's an interesting thought experiment. Looking through deep time is picking out what happened from fragmentary evidence - looking at what survived means trying to see the picture with many very big holes in it. The many extinctions of nearer kin that might have descended along with us to modern day (of course changing themselves) make the gulf between tetrapods and lungfish today seem yawningly huge.
no subject
Date: Mar. 25th, 2022 05:49 am (UTC)Ugh. :( Yeah, this sounds very "rebel indiscriminately against anything that looks at all like authority!" Which is especially obnoxious if he's in a position where there isn't even any real personal risk involved.
There is probably a whole category of memoir/semi-fictional books that have been written about experiences like this, and I am sure lots of good art and literature can be made out of it
I haven't read any books specifically about mushrooms, but Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception comes to mind as an interesting autobiographical piece about psychedelic experiences on mescaline. But yeah, it definitely matters that he doesn't try to disguise the book as being about anything other than his subjective experience.
Like, based on your description, it definitely sounds like the mushroom book was meant to appeal to the shroomer crowd rather than to people who actually want to know more about the biology of fungi, but it also kind of sounds like it fails on both levels?
The second book sounds fascinating, and makes me wish I spent more time reading science books. Though I have to say, given how many people apparently find it inconceivable that we could be descended from apes, I sort of doubt having more lobe-finned fish around would really make any difference to how people feel about evolution...
no subject
Date: Mar. 27th, 2022 08:04 pm (UTC)It felt like he wanted to dress up his shrooms experience as very scientific and I just disagree you should.
That's true enough haha. It's not so much familiarity as rejection of the whole concept that humans aren't the most special, chosen by god, etc. No amount of lobe-finned fish will help with that.