Mycosophy

Mycosophy is the philosophy that comes from seeing the World through the lens of fungal biology, ecology and evolution, and asking how our understanding of nature, evolution, life on Earth and our place in nature, can be improved through a rebalancing of a previous innate bias that arose from our past ignorance of fungi and their symbiotic modes of existence. Until 10th January 1969, mycology, the biological study of fungi, was considered a niche area of Botany (study of plants) of little relevence or importance to the life sciences as a whole. Although the specialist study of fungi (mycology) had existed for several generations, fungi had in fact been miss-classified during this time as peculiar plants. It turns out that fungi were always far closer to animals, having shared common ancestors with animals when life was confined to the oceans, much more recently than the last common ancestor between fungi and plants. On 10th Januray 1969 a paper was published in the international journal Science that proposed that a third multicellular Eukaryotic Kingdom of life, Fungi, be added to the pre-existing Kingdoms Plantae and Animalia. The paper proposed moving from a 4 Kingdon classification to a 5 Kingdom classification of life on Earth, fitting an additional branch into the evolutionary tree of life that had previously been accepted. The sequence of evolution proposed from the origin of life 3.7 Billion years ago, to present, starts with Kingdom Monera (Bacteria), then Kingdom Potoctista (Protista), followed by the three Eukaryotic multicellular Kingdoms of Fungi, Plants and Animals. More recently, Kingdom Monera has been sub-divided into two bacterial Kingdoms; Kingdom Archybacteria and Kingdom Eubacteria, making the current total of 6 accepted Kingdoms of life. The significance of the belated recognition that we have been living on a planet unaware that fungi are a unique Kingdom of life is that for the most part of history, going back to the ancient Greeks, we were always wrong to have seen the world principly through the lens of Zoology and Botany - as being the only important branches of Biological Science. Re-assessing wrong and limited assumptions, biases and beliefs that have arison from this historical error of under-rating the importance of fungi is therefore a part of mycosophy. Re-writing this wrong has enabled us to appreciate more fully the importance of mycelial symbiotic relations of different kinds as underpinning many of the most important evolutionary transitions during the history of life on this planet. Another aspect of mycosophy is to appreciate the versatile biochemistry of fungi in their prolific production of chemicals, medicines, antibiotics and psychedelics, and the benefits which these have brought humans through the ages, since the dawn of humanity itself. With the knowledge of fungi, their mycelial ecology and evolution, and their great benefits, it is indeed possible to see the World in a new light.