Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures-纠缠的生命

英国皇家学会将2021年的科学图书奖授予英国生物学家默林·谢尔德雷克（Merlin Sheldrake）。评委称其获奖作品“科学严谨”，“阐明了重要但鲜为人知的话题”。

《纠缠的生命》以探索真菌的世界为主题。真菌没有大脑，却仍然可以解决复杂的问题，操纵动物的行为。默林·谢尔德雷克以在巴拿马热带森林中的地下真菌网络研究获得剑桥大学热带生态学博士学位，他在这本书里详细介绍了真菌的存在早于人类历史数百万年，没有它们植物就不会进化、登陆，而缺少植物登陆这一进化史上的里程碑，人类也不会存在。
本届评审委员会主席、著名生物化学家和免疫学家卢克·奥尼尔（Luke O’Neill）认为《纠缠的生命》对真菌世界进行了精彩描述，是一本重要的、科学严谨又有趣的读物。“对于不熟悉真菌领域的人来说，这似乎是一个没有价值的话题，但默林·谢尔德雷克却以最生动的方式将其展现。在书中我们能读到真菌的各种趣闻，它们帮助植物在陆地上殖民，又形成让树木得以交流的巨大网络（“Wood Wide Web”树木万维网）。还有真菌采集爱好者的故事，真菌如何消化塑料帮助拯救地球，甚至它们如何操纵我们的思想。这是最好的科学写作，它再次强调了科学方法对我们努力理解周遭世界是如此重要。”

书名：Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures《纠缠的生命：真菌如何创造我们的世界、改变我们的思想、塑造我们的未来》

作者：Merlin Sheldrake

简介：There is a lifeform so strange and wondrous that it forces us to rethink how life works…

Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.

In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.

Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.