Merlin Sheldrake is a Cambridge-trained biologist who completed his PhD studying mycorrhizal networks in tropical forests, and who writes about fungi with the combined authority of a scientist and the enthusiasm of someone genuinely bewitched. *Entangled Life* is one of the finest popular science books of recent years — a book that doesn't just inform but genuinely destabilises your sense of what it means to be a living thing.
What Fungi Actually Are
Most people think of fungi as mushrooms — the fruiting bodies you find in forests or on plates. But a mushroom is to a fungus what an apple is to an apple tree: the visible reproductive structure of a much larger organism, most of which lives underground. The main body of a fungus is the mycelium: a web of thread-like filaments called hyphae that can extend for kilometres through soil, wood, or flesh.
Fungi are neither plants nor animals. They are a separate kingdom of life, more closely related to animals than to plants, and they predate the emergence of land plants by hundreds of millions of years. Without fungi, there would be no forests — the mycorrhizal relationships between fungal networks and plant roots are what made the colonisation of land possible.
The Wood Wide Web
Sheldrake approaches the controversial “wood wide web” concept — the idea that trees communicate and share resources through fungal networks — with admirable scientific care. He presents Suzanne Simard’s research honestly, including its limitations, and then zooms out to the broader question: what does it mean that plants, which cannot move, have evolved elaborate chemical and resource-sharing relationships with organisms that can?
His answer is one of the book’s great contributions: the concept of individuality itself becomes problematic in a world of fungal entanglements. A tree in a mycorrhizal network is not a self-contained individual — it is a node in a larger organism. The boundaries we draw between organisms are human conceptual tools, not features of reality.
Fungi make worlds. They also unmake them. Between these two tendencies lies most of life on Earth.
— Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
6 Key Ideas From This Book
The colonisation of land by plants was enabled by partnerships with fungi. Fossil evidence shows mycorrhizal associations in the first land plants. Without these partnerships, the soil chemistry and nutrient cycling that supports all land ecosystems would not exist.
Slime moulds (not technically fungi, but often discussed alongside them) have been shown to solve maze problems and recreate efficient transport networks. Sheldrake uses these examples to challenge the assumption that intelligence requires a nervous system or a brain.
Lichen — the grey-green crusts on rocks and tree bark — is not a single organism but a symbiosis of fungi, algae, and bacteria so complete that it was classified as a plant for centuries. Sheldrake uses lichen to explore the question of where one organism ends and another begins.
Fungi are the primary decomposers on land — without them, dead wood and organic matter would accumulate and the carbon cycle would collapse. The process of decomposition is not destruction but transformation into the nutrients that feed the next generation of life.
The more we know about mycorrhizal entanglements, symbiotic microbiomes, and interspecies chemical communication, the less coherent the concept of the "individual organism" becomes. We are all networks within networks within networks.
Certain fungi can break down petroleum, plastic, and radioactive material. "Mycoremediation" is a nascent but promising field. Fungi that evolved to break down lignin — the hardest natural polymer on Earth — appear capable of degrading many of the synthetic polymers we've created.
Any Weaknesses?
The book covers enormous territory and some of it passes very quickly. Readers without a science background may find certain chapters — particularly those on chemical signalling and evolutionary biology — difficult to follow without additional context. Sheldrake’s excitement occasionally leads him to jump between topics faster than the reader can assimilate them.
The practical applications of mycology — mycoremediation, myco-architecture, fungi as food and medicine — are raised but not developed in depth. Given the genuine urgency of these applications, the book sometimes feels more interested in the wonder of fungi than in what we might do with that wonder.
Readers who loved *The Hidden Life of Trees* and want the more scientifically rigorous version of the same territory, along with a genuinely mind-expanding philosophical dimension.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben for the forester's perspective on what Sheldrake describes scientifically, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer for the Indigenous philosophical framework that Sheldrake's science points toward.
Philosophers and social scientists. Sheldrake's sustained challenge to the concept of individuality has implications that extend far beyond biology — into political philosophy, economics, and how we think about human relationships.
Your assumptions about individuality, intelligence, and the boundaries between organisms will be systematically dismantled. This is a feature, not a bug, but some readers find it unsettling.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Entangled Life worth reading?
Entangled Life is one of the best popular science books published this century. It changes not just what you know but how you think — about living systems, about individuality, about intelligence, about the extraordinary strangeness of life on this planet. Read it slowly. Talk about it with people. Let it sit.
Who should read Entangled Life?
Readers who loved The Hidden Life of Trees and want the more scientifically rigorous version of the same territory, along with a genuinely mind-expanding philosophical dimension.
What is Entangled Life about in one sentence?
Merlin Sheldrake is a Cambridge-trained biologist who completed his PhD studying mycorrhizal networks in tropical forests, and who writes about fungi with the combined authority of a scientist and the enthusiasm of someone genuinely bewitched.
The Verdict
*Entangled Life* is one of the best popular science books published this century. It changes not just what you know but how you think — about living systems, about individuality, about intelligence, about the extraordinary strangeness of life on this planet. Read it slowly. Talk about it with people. Let it sit.
→ Find on Amazon