Matt Spike

the life logistic

Project maintained by matspike Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Into the Fungiverse

This week, against all my better instincts, we’ll be looking at four clips from the beautifully filmed, very very eccentric Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi (2019). As you are aware, this course is supposed to be about language evolution and not mushrooms, so you probably find my choice of viewing material confusing. Don’t worry: the plan is to use these videos as a target for evolutionary thinking, and to apply knowledge we’ve covered on this course.

The people behind this documentary really, really like fungi. This means they know a whole bunch of cool stuff about mushrooms, and have done a staggeringly good job with the cinematography: mould has never looked so good. On the other hand, this sparkly-eyed enthusiasm for fungi hasn’t done much for their objectivity: amongst a large number of cool fungus facts, they make a number of rather surprising scientific claims. Watch each clip with an extremely healthy dose of scepticism, and for all of them think about which claims are surprising or interesting but true, which are questionable, and which are… well, you’ll see.

Video 1: Mycelium communication

This one’s relatively tame. Think about:

  1. The kinds of relationships between organisms.
  2. What kinds of communication exist.
  3. The relationship between 1 and 2.
  4. What you find surprising or interesting.

Video 2: Fungi and you

We’re getting somewhere now. Think about:

  1. The evolutionary history of fungi.
  2. The connection between humans and fungi.
  3. The discussion of intelligence.
  4. What you find surprising or interesting.

Video 3: Science!

I won’t spoil it for you. Think about… all of it.

Video 4:

This is also pretty special. Think about which, if any, of the claims made here have any merit.