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The Rise of Yeast: Now an Opera!

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:28:39 GMT

Paradise Lost

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:11:10 GMT

Paradise Lost is the greatest English poem. It is a triumph of humanity in the same literary league as the Iliad , Odyssey , and Aeneid . On second thought, the comparison is off beam. Milton’s epic is greater than these points of departure. It stands alone, high eminent, as the most insightful and beautiful rendering of the human condition in print. It does much more than Milton’s feigned plan to “justify the ways of God to men,” asserting, instead, the ways of men to God, and, as it flows, eclipses all the divinations of Greek and Roman gods.

Even a brief dip into the poem has the inspirational power of a clear sunrise on a brisk winter morning, when breath turns to steam and the reappearance of our orange star sanctions a day of glorious possibilities. We are the beneficiaries of Eve’s act of rebellion. She ate the fruit, Adam followed, and, for better and for worse, “The world was all before them.” It is, to be frank, a work of dazzling artistry. All of Titian is its painted equivalent. Little else in the history of Western artistic expression comes close, although Bach wrote some nice tunes and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is a very good film.

Readers tend to personalize the poem, absorbing particular scenes and lines that resonate for reasons of individual taste and concerns. My devotion to Satan’s pain as the voyeur in Eden, reflects some loneliness on my part I suppose, the sense of being a lifelong outsider. On a more uplifting note, Milton’s descriptions of Eve’s naked beauty and the afterglow following the consummation of their marriage will haunt me until my thoughts are no richer than those of a potato.

These, lulled by nightingales, embracing slept,

And on their naked limbs the flowery roof

Showered roses, which the morn repaired. Sleep on,

Blest pair!

(Book IV 771-774)

We are Mycozoans

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 20:20:41 GMT

The evolutionary kinship of the fungi and animals is indicated by their combination into a single supergroup of organisms called the opisthokonts . This uninspiring term refers to the arrangement of shared cell structures called cilia. I suggest that we adopt a more evocative name: mycozoans .

What is the Brain-Eating Amoeba and (How) Can We Avoid It?

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 14:52:15 GMT

[Image of amoeba adapted from A. Cassiopeia Russell, et al., Frontiers in Microbiology 14 (2023):1264348.]

A brain-eating amoeba called Naegleria has received a lot of recent media coverage, including the tragic deaths of a 12-year-old boy in South Carolina who swam in a local reservoir, and a 71-year-old Texas woman who had flushed her sinuses with a neti pot. Using anything other than sterilized water in a neti pot is a proven hazard, but should we be concerned about splashing around in lakes and rivers? This post describes the infection process, explains why cases of this terrible illness may be increasing, and considers the risks of summer recreational activities in our rivers.

There have been fewer than 200 cases of this infection in America in the last 50 years and all of these deaths resulted from the nasal inhalation of warm water contaminated with the microbe. There are thousands of species of microbes that we call amoebas because they crawl in a similar fashion to the iconic “classroom” amoeba, Amoeba proteus , which is recognized from the simplest drawing of a wavy outline with a dot in the middle. Naegleria is as distantly related to Amoeba as a rhinoceros is to a rhododendron, but it moves in the same shape-shifting fashion. Unlike the schoolroom amoeba, however, Naegleria can also swim by sprouting a pair of flagella. At one time it was thought that the frisky swimming stage was the one that infected humans, but the crawling cells that gather at the surface of the water are actually more dangerous because they are positioned perfectly for snorting high into the nasal cavities of swimmers.

The migration of the amoebas from the nose to the brain is circuitous because the head jelly is enclosed in the skull, wrapped in membranes called meninges, and protected by a formidable tissue layer called the blood-brain barrier that separates the bloodstream from the central nervous system. Trauma to the head that damages these shields can lead to infections, but even an uninjured nose is an anatomical liability for anyone who encounters a pathogenic amoeba. This does not mean that everyone who inhales water carrying the amoebas will become infected—far from it. Mucus that lines the nasal sinuses works as a sticky trap and antibodies bind to the amoebas interfering with their attempts to attach to the tissues underneath.

The amoebas are also attacked by white blood cells called neutrophils as they try to get a good foothold on the sinus tissues. As the neutrophils close in, like bloodhounds set loose on fugitives, the amoebas reshape their membranes into suction cups and tear into the fleshy tissues of the sinuses to escape. The odds are stacked against the amoebas, but any that follow the nerves that snake through perforations in the bony roof of the nose have the chance of reaching the brain. The escapees leave the neutrophils howling in the sinuses and the prognosis for the swimmer is grim. Headaches, fever, neck stiffness, nausea, and vomiting occur within as little as a day after exposure, and the symptoms proceed to light sensitivity, seizures, hallucinations, coma, and death.

Physicians call this brain infection primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, or PAM. Treatments are very limited. A drug called miltefosine that has been used to treat a tropical disease called leishmaniasis for more than 20 years is showing promise as a new medicine for PAM patients. This makes sense because the parasite that causes leishmaniasis belongs to the same supergroup of microorganisms as Naegleria . The importance of finding treatments for PAM is increasing with the concern expressed by epidemiologists that these infections are likely to become more common as the planet gets warmer and the geographical range of the microbe widens. Warming lakes and rivers will certainly advantage this amoeba, which is happiest in water with temperatures between 30 and 42 degrees Celsius, or 86 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Naegleria fatalities have already been reported in India, China, and Southeast Asia. Countries with cooler climates may not escape from this public health threat. Water used to cool nuclear and conventional power plants can support high levels of the amoeba, which represents a source of potential infections when the heated water is discharged into rivers and lakes.

The Centers for Disease Control recommends holding your nose shut or using a nose clip if you jump or dive into a river. This provides little comfort. We know that the amoeba finds its way into the brain from the nasal passages, but the rarity of the infection suggests that there may be more to this than inhaling the microbe through the nostrils. Neti pot users increase the pressure within their nasal passages as they rinse and expel water, which may have the effect of forcing the microbe into these sensitive tissues. This leads me to wonder whether swimmers could be safer without nose clips, because closure of the nostrils prevents the reflexive expulsion of water pushed into the back of the throat.

Knowledge of the amoeba leaves us with a feeling of unease. The development of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis after playing in a river or lake is less likely than drowning, but this fact is of little comfort to anyone who contracts the brain disease. So, what do we do? Shrug our shoulders, hope for the best, fear the worst, and jump from a rope swing into the river. After all, amoebas and other microbes are everywhere and will outlive us by an eternity.

The Mycologist: The Movie

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 14:08:43 GMT

A screenplay by Matthew R. Riffle and Zackary D. Hill based on my 2017 novel, The Mycologist: The Diary of Bartholomew Leach, Professor of Natural History , is an official selection at the 2025 Cindependent Film Festival: https://www.cindependentfilmfest.org/

Wanda Sykes must be cast to play Phoebe Smith, Queen of Claysburgh. Excerpt: When Cates and I rode across the field, Phoebe Smith knocked out her pipe to prepare for battle: "Dare you is you damned whale; Cates haul you in again from offshore? You bin lying there sunnin your fat belly in Christ’s Sun I spose, hopin for a reeel high tide to pull you back to your damned porpuss-whore of a mother." I looked at Cates in utter amazement. He shrugged his shoulders and dismounted.

Mycobiome Art

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 10:38:36 GMT

Dr. Gemma Anderson-Tempini is an artist working on a project about the mycobiome for a museum commission in Exeter in England. She asked several mycologists to “draw the mycobiome,” to help stimulate her thinking. This is my first draft in which I concentrated on the problems caused by fungi that live on the body. I could draw an alternative view to show that many of the same fungi are also part of the healthy microbiome. Interactions between fungi and bacteria is part of this story. Another approach would be to draw a mother nursing a baby and highlight the fungi in breast milk and the developing mycobiome of the infant.

What is a mushroom?

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 13:49:34 GMT

With head-scratching among consumers about the sources of medicinal mushroom products, a reliable definition of a mushroom seems useful. Clarity is important because many of these “medicinals” come from mycelia instead of mushrooms and their chemical composition can be quite different. Here is my two-part definition.

Mushrooms are the fungal equivalent of the fruits produced by plants. They release microscopic spores rather than seeds. We often refer to mushrooms as fruit bodies.

Mushrooms are the reproductive organs of fungi. Their spores germinate to form feeding colonies called mycelia that grow as networks of branching filaments called hyphae. Mushrooms develop from mature mycelia to complete the fungal life cycle.

Clay Tablet

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 13:22:07 GMT

Money's Laws

Money’s Law of Nature : Life is chaos making sense of chaos.

Money’s Law of Cell Biology : While there is a lot more to a human being than an amoeba, there is no more to being a cell in a human than being the cell of an amoeba.

Money’s Law of Ethology : Animal life is a nightmare.

In Memoriam: Frank Harold

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 16:39:36 GMT

“What I have done . . . is to make a constructive contribution to the global conversation of science and to gain some measure of insight into that great mystery, the origin of life . . . The way of science is for the best of our achievements to endure in substance but lose their individuality, like raindrops falling into a pond. So let it be.” Frank Harold (2016)

Click here for the tribute in full

Screenplay

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 14:29:16 GMT

A screenplay by Matthew R. Riffle and Zackary D. Hill based on my 2017 novel, The Mycologist: The Diary of Bartholomew Leach, Professor of Natural History , was an official selection at the 2024 Ink & Cinema Adapted Story Showcase.

Click here for brief excerpt from the novel

The Jellyfish Who Lost Hope

Thu, 23 May 2024 11:35:35 GMT

Hydras and the Roots of Depression

British soldiers attending a popular science lecture in the nineteenth century were shown creatures in a drop of pond water projected onto a screen from an instrument called a lantern microscope. The soldiers “looked on with intense interest” when a water flea became entangled in the stinging arms of a Hydra , and “made the most violent efforts to escape, turning over and over, amid excited murmurs from the soldiers.” When the water flea “hurled itself free . . . every man in the room sprang to his feet and joined in a deafening cheer.” They had empathized with the combat on the microscope slide, recognizing the Darwinian “struggle for life” in these simple organisms. Reading this story, I am more interested in the response of the Hydra to its failed attack, and the possibility that this tiny relative of jellyfish felt dejected. Because, despite their brainless nature, hydras are liable to depression.

Hydra is the Latin name for more than 20 species of freshwater invertebrates that are around one millimeter in length and extend multiple tentacles covered with stinging cells that fire poisoned barbs into their prey. This jellyfish relative has been used as for research on developmental biology since its discovery in the eighteenth century when investigators marveled at its remarkable powers of regeneration. When hydras are cut into pieces, whole animals regrow from each of the severed parts. Hydras have two layers of cells, the ectoderm and endoderm, but lack the middle mesoderm layer from which the skeleton, muscles, and organs develop in more complicated animals like us. Under a microscope, the stingers are evident as blobs that run the length of their arms and give them the look of beaded necklaces. The hydra waves its arms through the water, flexes its cylindrical body, and moves from place to place by detaching and reattaching its adhesive foot.

A hydra does not have a permanent mouth, but opens a fresh one in the middle of its tentacles each time it feeds. As the mouth widens, the hydra swallows the water flea or other pond creature whole, distending its body like a boa constrictor. The water flea has a brain that connects to its single eye and processes signals from its environment and coordinates its evasive actions when it is caught by a hydra. Its use of neurotransmitters and hormones common to most animals suggest that it engages in an emotional life of rewards and punishments that relies on the same elementary mechanisms that control our actions and thoughts. Water fleas do not worry about the future, but they are flooded with stress hormones when they are stung by a hydra. But what does a hydra feel?

The brainless Hydra uses two networks of nerves to control its movements. One is located in the outer layer of cells, the ectoderm, the other within the endoderm that lines the digestive cavity. Lacking a brain, it does not send and receive nerve impulses from different parts of the body at the same time, but its nerve webs coordinate a whole-body response when it captures a water flea, moves toward sunlight, or contracts in response to an injury. And, surprisingly, hydras express traces of an emotional life in periods of reduced activity in which they contract their bodies and arms and condenses into a ball, or simply lie flat on their side. Hydra experts have called this depression for more than a century without implying any relationship to human unhappiness. This anthropomorphic extension is mine.

Depression in hydras was studied by German biologists in the early twentieth century who found that the animals suspended their usual activities in response to a variety of environmental changes including poor water quality, the provision of too many water fleas, and increased temperature. Even the process of collection from ponds and transfer to an aquarium makes them close down. This is reminiscent of the desperation expressed by killer whales taken from the ocean, who refuse food until they are force fed by staff in marine parks. Hydras can be saved by force-feeding them with water fleas stuck on the end of a glass pipet.

The reactions in hydras are associated with the shedding of cells into the digestive cavity and can be viewed as mechanical responses to damaging environmental conditions, like our physiological symptoms of sunburn or food poisoning. But there is more to this. Seeking treatments to keep her colonies of hydras alive in her lab at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, biologist Libbie Hyman found that transferring depressed animals to an aquarium in which other hydras were flourishing had a miraculous effect: “The beneficial effect . . . is almost incredible . . . Depressed specimens that have refused to feed for several days may accept food within fifteen minutes after being placed in a culture containing healthy hydras.”

Extending Hyman’s observations, Sivatosh Mookerjee, an Indian developmental biologist, observed that hydras kept in the laboratory fell into a state of depression every winter. Using the degree of body and tentacle contraction, digestive activity, and the speed of regeneration when they were sliced apart, Mookerjee categorized his animals on a scale of increasing depression. Most of the hydras seemed slightly depressed and could be nursed back to health, whereas the highly depressed specimens seemed to have passed the point of no return and fell apart cell by cell.

It is tempting to recognize simple expressions of the depressive disorders recognized in big-brained animals in these stress responses. The absence of a brain may seem to exclude the possibility of consciousness, but the sophistication of the brainless hydra is evident in its daily cycles of unconsciousness or sleep. Hydras sleep according to a predictable rhythm between periods of physical activity, take longer to be aroused by a flash of light when they are asleep, and sleep more when they are treated with melatonin. Dopamine pushes them into a deeper sleep, which is the reverse of its excitatory effect on us. They also respond very negatively to sleep deprivation imposed by vibrating their containers, with sluggish responses to all manner of stimuli and associated changes in gene expression.

When the amazing regenerative powers of Hydra were discovered in the eighteenth century, the little jellyfish became a sensation among European intellectuals. It was showcased in the salons of pre-revolutionary France and was described by a Dr. Gilles Auguste Bazin, a prominent natural historian, as “a discovery in a word that disconcerts the entire nation of reasoners.” Voltaire was captivated by hydras that he watched in a jar kept on the mantlepiece of a friend’s home, but refused to believe that they were animals, and Diderot fictionalized them as human polyps that lived on Jupiter and Saturn in his philosophical dialogue, d’Alembert’s Dream . Inspired by hydras, the philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, advanced a theory of mechanistic materialism that culminated in L’homme machine (Man a Machine), published in 1747. La Mettrie was struck by the uniformity of nature in which humans differed from other animals in our degree of complexity rather than any essence. He also argued that the regeneration of whole hydras from their dissected parts demonstrated that the spirit or soul of an animal was inseparable from its body. As far as he was concerned, Cartesian dualism died with the discovery of the hydra.

When news of the discovery spread to England, hydras sent from Holland and found in ditches around London captivated the gentlemen of the Royal Society. In his 1768 poem, Isabella: Or, The morning , Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, recounts the description of the hydra to an unnamed duchess in her country house by a visitor from London, as “The wonderfuls’t of all the works of nature,” which causes the lady to exclaim, “Lord I must see it, or I’m undone.”

Conscious or not, hydras are fascinating animals that offer biologists and philosophers a bridge between species with brains and the majority of life, which is brainless, and microscopic. Resorting to some rather punishing experimental procedures, hydras can even show what can be done in a seemingly conscious fashion without a nervous system. If the stem cells are eliminated from hydras using radiation or chemical treatment, the animals lose their nerve nets over several weeks because they cannot replace the neurons that are dissolved through a natural cycle of tissue replacement. The loss of the nervous system results in changes in the shape of the animal, reduced sensitivity to mechanical stimulation and light, but no changes in movements or feeding behavior. Robbed of nerves, the hydra is left with a good deal of its behavioral complexity, although the symptoms of its melancholia have not been observed.

The behavior of hydras overlaps with the sensitivity of slime molds, fungi, and even single-celled amoebas, which some biologists regard as consciousness. Waving its tentacles, Hydra offers a model for the deepest roots of our mental anguish, demonstrating the sensitivity of all organisms to the exigencies of their environment. There is some solace, perhaps, in recognizing that we are united with the rest of nature in our propensity toward sadness. We share the need of these jellyfish relatives for a clean place to live in the company of other animals.

R.F.K. Junior's Worm

Fri, 10 May 2024 12:37:57 GMT

With news of R.F.K. Junior’s encounter with a parasitic worm, I invite you to sing along with me to the tune of “My Favorite Things”:

Roundworms in most guts and hookworms in plenty

Segmented tapeworms that make you feel empty

Many amoebas and pinworms like strings

These were a few of our nightmarish things.

(From “Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines,” page 111)

Our Amoeboid Selves

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:45:15 GMT

Species perform life cycles by transmitting distinctive collections of genes from one generation to the next. Individuals contribute to this process if they serve as biological parents, but there is no cycle for each of them, each human being, just a beginning and an end. Cells behaving as amoebas are conductors for the whole journey, sculpting the developing fetus, protecting the body from bacterial and fungal infection, repairing wounds, and removing worn out cells. Amoebas also destroy cancer cells until they turn cancerous themselves, spread tumors across the body, and extinguish one in six of us. All of these amoeboid human cells dig deep into the billion-year-old instructions in their genomes to activate the machinery for forming pseudopodia and flowing and feeding from place to place. From birth to death, womb to tomb, the body calls on its ancient amoeboid ancestry, just as it relies on its ciliary history to make sperm cells and the hairy cells that line the lungs and other organs. We are gigantic amalgams of the single-celled microbes that learned to crawl and swim in the mud and sunlit pools of the Precambrian.

Book recommendations

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 17:16:20 GMT

If Kafka makes you laugh, this is for you:

https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/nicholas-p-money

Schopenhauer

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 15:41:11 GMT

As Homo sapiens races toward extinction, there is solace in recognizing that the rest of nature will be relieved by our departure. Adapted from The Selfish Ape which was published in 2019: If extraterrestrials had trained their microphones on Earth they would have detected a rise in the exclamations of animal life in recent millennia, building to a crescendo of moans and grunts from animals subjected to ritualized torture in stadia, bull rings and bear pits, augmented by the modern vivisection of rodents, cats and primates—terrified animals restrained in the lab and probed with instruments that would have taxed the pornographic inventiveness of the Catholic inquisitors. Factory farming is another way we torment the innocent.

The philosopher Schopenhauer said: “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” Today’s justifications for our loathsome behavior include the economic burden of treating animals more kindly and the medical necessity of experimentation. We rest, as always, on staggering hubris. It is always about us.

Recipe for Creation

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 17:08:25 GMT

Begin by sprinkling a generous serving of planets around a medium-sized star; stir gently and allow the mixture to cool until rain begins to fall on one of the planets; keep stirring, be patient, and wait for the arms of an amoeba to reach into the water.

Photo: Amoeba proteus , Marek Mis Photomicrography ( https://mismicrophoto.com ), with permission.

On the Origin of Goldilocks Mushrooms by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Fungi in the Struggle for Life

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 22:19:48 GMT

In a Goldilocks mushroom, the gills are not too close, not too far apart, but just the right distance for the spores to be shot to the open midplane. The following figure from a forthcoming review article shows the reciprocal changes in gill separation and discharge distance that might have played out during mushroom evolution. (Too esoteric for a blog post? Yes.)

Caption: Hypothetical evolutionary seesaw that matches gill separation to the distance of ballistospore discharge. In this diagram, a modification to the range of the spore discharge mechanism precedes an increase in gill spacing which is followed by a second adjustment to gill spacing that boosts spore output or escape from the fruit body. Goldilocks mushrooms in which the spore output is optimized to gill spacing are indicated by the level seesaws diagrammed in (A) and (D). (A) Goldilocks I: In the starting condition, optimal spore output is supported from fruit body whose spores are shot to the midplane between opposing gills. (B) Spore size begins to increase within a fungal population in response to an ecological opportunity for larger spores. The larger spores produce larger Buller’s drops in this model and are shot further than the smaller spores. These developmental adjustments happen incrementally and reduce spore output as more and more spores hit the opposing gill. This outcome is a potential feeder toward the loss of ballistospory in favor of dispersal by animals in gasteroid descendants from the population in (B). (C) Ballistospory is maintained in other populations by an increase in gill spacing that limits the wastage of spores. In this case, spores are launched short of the midplane because the distance between gills is unnecessarily large, and the efficiency of the fruit body decreases. (D) Goldilocks II: Optimal spore output is restored by a slight reduction in gill spacing so that the larger spores are shot to the midplane between gills. The same model applies to poroid mushrooms if we replace changes in gill spacing with modifications in tube size.

The Blessing of Extinction

moneynp@miamioh.edu (Nik Money) — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 09:55:46 GMT

Humans are on the fast track to extinction and the mess that we have made will take most of the larger animals with us. In our unenviable position as witnesses of the collapse of the biosphere, grace can be sought in the certainty of the peaceful afterlife of the planet. The death of the last human will mean the end of human anguish. Picking gorillas as an example of the nonhuman casualties, the death of the last one is also hopeful, because after two centuries of gorilla hunting and trapping, there will be no more of these beautiful creatures to be shot. Pick any species of animal and its extinction will end the misery of its members. When humans and other animals with brains are gone, Earth will orbit our star without fear and loathing for the first time in 500 million years. To explore this idea, we need to accept what is happening, seek absolution from our sins in the inevitability of the apocalypse, and be assured that the nightmarish character of zoology is almost over.

Acceptance

Since 1850, the human population has increased from one billion to eight billion and the level of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by 50%. Carbon dioxide traps heat on Earth and more of it makes us warmer. We pour billions of tons of this gas into the atmosphere every year by burning hundreds of tons oil, coal, and natural gas every second . What could possibly happen to change this picture? The pandemic shutdown reduced carbon dioxide emissions by a few percent, but they rebounded and are increasing in its wake. By 2100, the global average temperature will be 4 degrees Celsius higher than the end of the last century. This is the likeliest projection.

Climate optimists will counter this scenario with examples of technological solutions. The effect of these remedies on extinction can be dismissed with a thought experiment. Imagine that we found a way to meet our energy needs without coal, oil, and gas. Once the burning stopped, the future would feel a little cooler, especially if methods for burying the existing carbon dioxide were perfected. But with the climate stabilized, the behavior that caused us to burn so much fuel would intensify, resulting in more humans, less forest and grasslands, and greater pollution of rivers and oceans. With or without climate change, our war with nature will proceed. Decades ago, Gerald Durrell, the famous conservationist, recognized, that “the human race is in the position of a man sawing off the tree branch he is sitting on.” Thirty years after Durrell’s death, the human population has increased by 2 billion and the damage has intensified. The branch will snap now whether we keep sawing or not.

The timeline for extinctions is not known, but, sooner or later, the disappearing mammals will be joined by the other groups of animals. Almost everything will be leaving the metaphorical ark, creeping down the gangplank into oblivion. Millions of other species, seen and unseen, including plants, seaweeds, and fungi will be leaving too. The tiniest of organisms will inherit the planet, but great gulps of the microbial world will also disappear in the depths of this planetary holocaust.

Absolution

Look in the mirror and you will see a member of a species of African ape that has devastated the biosphere. You, personally, have caused a great deal of damage and are responsible for the suffering of many intelligent and sensitive creatures. Adults have left a trail of wreckage in their lives and children will participate in decades of future brutality toward nature. Vegetarians are not responsible for the suffering of farm animals, but they are culpable for the molestation of wildlife through the great net of international commerce. Throughout history, we have helped ourselves to huge helpings of hubris about the brilliance of humans and have avoided the truth of our nature—namely, that Homo sapiens is a uniquely destructive animal that has been active in the business of extinction since it dispersed from Africa 100,000 years ago.

In addition to killing animals for food, or to make space for more of us, we have bred and imprisoned animals for entertainment and for medical experimentation. To obviate our unpleasantness, we have decided that other species lack the capacity for terror. In this century, all but the cruelest of philosophers have moved on from the Cartesian fantasy that the absence of conversation implies the absence of emotion, but we cling to the fantasy of the heightened sensitivity of humans. While a chicken lacks a great repertoire of expressions of grief, it feels panic and experiences pain to the full extent of its avian brain, and we heighten the horror by keeping birds in factory farms in conditions of exquisite unpleasantness.

There is no excuse for the way that we ruin the lives of animals on farms and in labs, but we are pardoned from killing them in nature and destroying the biosphere. We are guiltless because animals are powered by the transfer of energy from one organism to another. The nightmare of zoology began when this fundamental rule of life was coupled with the evolution of brains and the necessity of suffering. This happened long before we arrived. Sentient life is designed for suffering because the avoidance of it is what keeps an animal alive for long enough to propel its genes into the future. When brains evolved, avoidance became conscious and with consciousness came fear. Our absolution for ruining the planet comes from the same evolutionary source: we need to eat and we seek to reproduce, and by being good at both things we have extracted too much energy from the planet. Nature was designed in this way.

Assurance

Animal sensitivity is the foundation of the great tragedy of the biosphere, the overarching sadness of earth, which will end when the species with brains are gone. Human extinction will mean no more animals in laboratories to dread the sound of the opening door and the sight of the approaching white coat, and, over a longer time span, injuries, illnesses, and starvation in nature will disappear, species by species as the planet gets hotter. This is not much to go on, but the end of suffering is the best news about the end times. Happiness will end too, of course, but contentment is fleeting and an animal that is never born will not miss the moments of satisfaction and joy.

Humans have always caused the suffering of other animals; we have destroyed most of the pristine ecosystems, and the rapid change in climate is our fault too. Most of these actions were hard baked into human nature. The apocalypse was inevitable because the cost of being human has always been extracted from the rest of nature. What do we do with this clarity of vision? I suggest that part of the answer lies in recognizing the fact that these are the last decades of pain. As terminal illness encourages many people to embrace the relief that they know will come with their departure, so we may feel some grace in these end times.

The way we spend our lives in the absence of hope for the future of humanity is a matter for the individual. The best that any of us can do until the sky falls, is to be kinder to each other and humane towards the rest of nature as it suffers with us on this watery globe. The sooner the biosphere collapses, the sooner that the brainy animals will be liberated from suffering. When we are gone, the biosphere is likely to repopulate with new species with brains, and the suffering will resume in millions of years. But at least things will be quiet for a while, and nothing will be horrified by existence as Earth spins on her soft axle.

Fly Agaric Coloration

moneynp@miamioh.edu (Nik Money) — Fri, 27 May 2022 19:40:17 GMT

Why are the color patterns of the fly agaric mushroom and the netted rhodotus mushroom similar, and why do both resemble the corpse flower? Does the interruption of the background color of these organisms stimulate the compound vision of flies? Is there any similarity between the patterning of these species and the mottled appearance of animal cadavers? Are some natural instances of white detailing on red backgrounds examples of Batesian or Müllerian mimicry? What is the meaning of this distinctive form of coloration among fungi and plants?

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

moneynp@miamioh.edu (Nik Money) — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 02:30:49 GMT

& a second recent musical homage:

Why Cretaceous Mushrooms Became Colorful, Started Glowing, Developed Perfumes, and Turned into Truffles

moneynp@miamioh.edu (Nik Money) — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 17:05:10 GMT

The answer, fellow mycologists, is blowing in the wind. Stalked mushrooms with gills beneath their umbrellas evolved in the Jurassic. This is the rough timing that we infer from the DNA clocks in fungi that appear to have been ticking for more than 150 million years. Jurassic forests were filled with prehistoric Chilean pines, or monkey puzzle trees, cycads, and other cone-bearing conifers. The first birds launched themselves from branches, small mammals crunched on insects, and ferns grew under the open tree canopy where the sunlight warmed the forest floor. Mushroom colonies spread in the leaf litter and established mycorrhizal symbioses with tree roots. The openness of the forests left them as windy as the surrounding grasslands which was perfect for mushrooms that relied on breezes to spread their spores. There was no need for any of these fungi to attract the attention of animals.

This self-sufficiency was challenged in the Cretaceous as carbon dioxide levels increased and the climate warmed. The flowering plants diversified and softwood trees with cones made room for the broadleaved hardwoods that thrived in the heat and closed the forest canopy. The woods became windbreaks. As the warming continued the temperature gradients between the poles and the equator weakened and the whole planet became less windy. Some estimates suggest that average windspeeds dropped by 30%. Confronted by the stillness of the Cretaceous forests, fungi began working with animals by painting toadstool caps and making some of them glow green, erecting stinkhorns with heads smeared with cadaverous slime, and perfuming truffles. Species that were unable to adapt to the obstacles to wind dispersal were eliminated, which may be part of the explanation for the mass extinction of Cretaceous fungi indicated in phylogenetic studies.

It seems likely that insects and other invertebrates performed an accessory role in dispersing mushroom spores in the Jurassic. But when the wind dropped in the Cretaceous, the value of insects as couriers rose, and coloration may have become a marketing tool for mushrooms in the same way that colorful flowers lure pollinators. (This, at least, is my hypothesis.) Experiments suggest that bioluminescence achieves the same goal. Insects attracted to mushrooms may have been rewarded with sugars secreted by the fungus, although fruit bodies provide more obvious benefits for insects by acting as incubators for eggs and refuges for larval maturation.

Some colors attracted birds and mammals and we may be underestimating the continuing importance of these relationships today. Interactions between mushrooms and animals are observed in species that suppress the expansion of the fruit body and do not expose their gills to the air. These are called secotioid mushrooms and they are viewed as intermediary forms in the evolution of the hypogeous fungi or truffles that perfected the animal-fungus symbiosis. (Truffles that evolved from gilled mushrooms and boletes are called false truffles to distinguish them from true truffles that belong to a different group of fungi.) Secotioid mushrooms are very colorful in some habitats, which is consistent with the significance of animal dispersal in their life cycles. Coloration is obviously immaterial for subterranean truffles whose volatile attractants were engineered to attract particular animal species rather than generalized scavengers on forest floor. Phallic mushrooms and their relatives arose at this time too, dispensing with wind dispersal in favor of transportation by carrion flies. All of these modifications were part of a great radiation of mushroom forms in the Cretaceous.

To summarize: Climatic changes in the Cretaceous may be part of the reason that mushrooms with a perfect mechanism for wind dispersal invested in mutualisms with animal vectors. These relationships involved fundamental modifications to the development of fruit bodies and are the foundation of much of the modern diversity of mushroom morphology. When we flip through the pages of a mushroom guide, paper or virtual, and marvel at the strange shapes and bright colors, we are looking at solutions to the problem of spreading spores when the wind stopped blowing.

***

Illustration: Leratiomyces erythrocephalus is a secotioid mushroom whose bright red caps attract birds that consume the fruit bodies and disperse their spores. Photo credit: fishHook Photography / Alamy Stock Photo

Civil War II & World War III

moneynp@miamioh.edu (Nik Money) — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 14:55:06 GMT

From the depths of this Ohio winter, I am pondering whether we are on the cusp of Civil War II in my beloved adopted country and The Eschaton in Ukraine. In a failed attempt to take my mind elsewhere I am reading poems by British poet and painter, David Jones (1895-1974). Jones served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in the First World War. His best-known poem is an epic, Anathemata, published in 1952, which defies synopsis. Returning to my current concerns, I adapt the following lines from his shorter verse, Protothalamion .

Song for America, 2022

I have heard bird-song

seen

flowers lean towards each other, under the sun

that shined to delineate the hate

Hares

moneynp@miamioh.edu (Nik Money) — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 10:34:14 GMT

It is so rare to take pause and breathe slowly enough to contemplate the experience of being alive. This is a terrible shame, given the sheer improbability of existence when measured against the infinite length of one’s dark bloodless future. Most moments of any lifetime are added to our libraries of blurred remembrances as soon as they are done, but there are a few that persist as if they never stopped happening. There was an evening from my childhood, for example, when I stood alone, confused but excited by the sight of boxing hares in a Chiltern meadow. They ran wildly, stopping every so often and raising themselves on their back legs to thump one another a few times, then tearing off again. The pointed ears of spectators stuck above the waving grass culms and the sun set to the cheerless accompaniment of a fox crying in the beech hanger above the meadow. I was mesmerized, breathless. Fifty years on, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe . . . Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion . . . I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.” And the mad March hares have boxed on in my skull throughout, and will continue to do so, I think, until time turns my brain into nothing more sensible than a boiled potato.

Commencement Speech for Western Program 2021

moneynp@miamioh.edu (Nik Money) — Sun, 16 May 2021 11:40:34 GMT

In 1665, a 30-year-old scientist called Robert Hooke published this copperplate engraving in his masterpiece, Micrographia. Hooke’s readers were astonished by this image—and others of flies, fungi, feathers, and snowflakes—made with the aid of a primitive microscope. Everyone was irritated by fleas but had never seen them as more than specks. What nobody knew, and nobody would know for another 230 years, was that these tiny animals transmitted an even tinier organism—the bacterium that caused bubonic plague.

In the year that Micrographia was published, one fourth of London’s population died from this infectious illness. Wealthy Londoners fled the city, knowing only that getting away from people with the disease was the best way to avoid contracting it themselves. Quarantines were put in place, some saw the illness as God’s punishment, and others blamed the Dutch for spreading the disease. Human behavior changes little . . . but our science has advanced in the intervening centuries, allowing us to characterize the virus that caused our pandemic, to understand how it attacks our cells, and to develop vaccines in record time.

Returning to the 17th century, a blind 57-year-old man escaped from London with his third wife and moved into a cottage in the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St. Giles as the plague swept across the capital city. John Milton may have completed Paradise Lost in the cottage, this is unclear, but the principal creation during his pastoral retreat was its sequel, Paradise Regained. With each daybreak in the cottage, he whispered the next lines of his epic to himself, dedicating them to memory by repetition, and paused, now and then, to listen to the dawn chorus. Milton had survived the Civil War and imprisonment after the Restoration of the Monarchy, and he escaped the Great Plague to write the most sublime poetry in the English language.

Like Milton, we have survived a tempest. This is what he wrote in Paradise Regained:

And now the sun with more effectual beams
Had cheered the face of earth, and dried the wet
From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds
Who all things now behold more fresh and green,
After a night of storm so ruinous,
Cleared up their choicest notes in bush and spray,
To gratulate the sweet return of morn.

And in the wake of the storm, you will leave this pretty place to live deeply in all ways imaginable and unimagined. Each of you has succeeded creatively in your plague year and this is something to celebrate. I hope that you look back on this as a special time in your life, as something more than a misadventure. Thank you for trusting us to be part of your personal and educational journey.

Nicholas P. Money, Western Program Director

Selfish Ape post-COVID

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 16:46:14 GMT

The good news, if you are reading this, is that you survived. The less positive news is that the COVID-19 pandemic and future infectious diseases are unlikely to forestall the end of Homo sapiens for very long. The Black Death caused the greatest proportional hit to human numbers. Around 100 million people died between 1347 and 1351, and the European population may have fallen by 40 percent. Demographic research shows, however, that the long-term effect on population growth was negligible. Human numbers dipped in the middle of the 14th century, but after a century or two we crawled out of the demographic pothole and the growth curve swept upward as if nothing had happened. In our time, the pandemic has killed fewer than 3 million people, which is offset by the number of births in a single week. COVID restrictions reduced fossil fuel consumption in some countries in 2020 but this will have no effect on the warming trend. To help us avoid catastrophe, COVID would need to transform the instinctive behavior of the survivors. It seems more probable that we will resume our mischief as soon as humanly possible.

The four horsemen

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 14:55:34 GMT

Anyone who believes that Homo sapiens will adjust its course and halt the commerce that is founded on greenhouse gas emissions is refraining from critical thought. In 2019, Earth’s atmosphere was disfigured by the largest annual release of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels in history. This is alarming, but it is not surprising, because the human population rose by more than 80 million in the same period and global GDP swelled by 3 percent. The biosphere is warming because there are more lives that are cultivated by burning ever-increasing quantities of oil, natural gas, and coal. Besides our atmospheric vandalism, we continue to acidify the oceans and have proven relentless in the removal of forests and natural grasslands. In short order, we anticipate more extreme weather events, crop losses due to drought and flooding, and the collapse of fisheries. Populations of the larger wild animals will continue to fall, insect numbers will pursue their precipitous decline, plant species will perish, and the microbial majority of life will shudder unseen.

Have you read any good news about the environment lately? I cannot think of a single joyful report about the biosphere in a very long time. And human prospects for survival are actually bleaker than most seem willing to admit. Let’s imagine that we devise a carbon capture system that reduces the level of greenhouse gases to the point that we cool off a little. What would happen next? Civilization would persevere, babies would keep coming, and the consumption of natural resources would accelerate. One way or another, we will destroy the components of the ecosystems that support our lives.

The path to extinction is difficult to avoid. I imagine that alien schoolchildren learn about the fate of civilizations once they begin burning their fossil fuels, or whatever similarly damaging inventions apply to other Goldilocks planets. There are steps in this process, comparable to the stages of cancer, from Stage One, when suspicious cells are confined, to Stage Four, where the illness has spread to other organs. As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote during his malady, “the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five.” As a species, we have been hovering around Stage Four for decades. “How long do the humans have left on Earth?” asks the schoolteacher on Planet Zeta, and noodly appendages are raised with enthusiasm across the classroom.

The end times will be horrific, but there is no sense denying their proximity. As paragons of consumption in the United States, our behavior gifts us with a great deal of material comfort. An objective look at the ecological cost-benefit of electric cars and solar panels shows that these are nothing more than funeral decorations for a dying planet. Nobody talks about population, but it is too late to thwart the apocalypse by contraception anyway. Few of us have any immediate plans to change our lifestyles.

Sooner or later we will have to confront the end times. There is no technological fix. Today’s opportunities for progress lie in psychiatry and philosophy. What sense do we make of our lives without a future for mankind? What sense can we make of a universe in which human consciousness will be extinct? Expressions of grace have always served us well in confronting our personal demise and their value may rise when we accept that civilization is approaching its expiration date. The focus on the grand carnival of nature is what’s different now. We may gain some personal sense of deliverance by looking squarely at the thing we have spoiled and admitting our fault. But the best that any of us can do until the sky falls is to be kinder to each other and humane towards the rest of life as it suffers with us on this watery globe. And who knows, if we are nicer, maybe things will keep running for longer than we expect.

The Limits of Liberty

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 13:14:53 GMT

News that Jerry Falwell, Jr., President of Liberty University, is mired in conflicts with former board members, encouraged me to look at the educational opportunities for science students at his evangelical school. The requirements for a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology are particularly disquieting. Majors take a handful of the usual courses in cell biology and genetics, but they are also charged with selecting offerings taught in the Center for Creation Studies. The purpose of this center is “to promote the development of a consistent biblical view of origins in our students,” and to “equip students to contend for their faith in the creation account in Genesis.” The Director of Creation Studies at Liberty, Dr. Marcus Ross, has a remarkable record of publications that includes a compendium of amphibians that survived the biblical flood 4,000 years ago. After a lengthy review of amphibian diversity, he concludes that 248 pairs of these animals must have been saved on Noah’s Ark. This scholarly work appeared in a periodical titled, Answers Research Journal, which is published by the Answers in Genesis (AIG) Ministry. AIG is the organization that runs the Creation “Museum” and Ark Encounter theme parks in Kentucky. I wonder what Marcus teaches students about radiometric methods for dating rocks? The lessons of Liberty highlight the privilege of teaching and learning at a state university. In such a place, the exploration of life is guided by objective evidence and we are liberated from the monkish and deluded past.

As earth turns on her soft axle

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 13:15:58 GMT

Whatever is agitating you today is eclipsed by the conclusions reached by the World Wildlife Fund in its latest Living Planet Report: https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2018 . Every personal concern pales in the shadow cast by this fearful document. That we have created the conditions that will ensure our decline is undeniable. There are too many of us, our consumerism has overheated the planet, and the biosphere is dying. What will we compose as the swan song for our species?

Welcome Class of 2022

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 17:08:34 GMT

Educators and students face the unprecedented challenge of advancing scholarship at a time when the extinction of our species seems very likely and the end of civilization is inevitable. Earth is warming swiftly and there is nothing that can be done now to prevent the forthcoming collapse of the subset of environmental conditions that are conducive to human persistence. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to help figure out how humanity can exit, stage left, with a little grace. This is the overarching intellectual challenge of this terminal human century. Forget the TED Talks about geothermal energy and electric cars, and solar panels are nothing more than funeral decorations.

A glance at the history of my university—Miami in Oxford, Ohio—provides an earlier divination of doom from a professor. Infectious disease was the greatest threat to the campus in the first half of the nineteenth century. Graves in the town cemetery commemorate students exterminated by measles, dysentery, and smallpox, but cholera was the epidemic that everyone feared. The spread of this illness stimulated an 1833 lecture by the Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon Scott, Miami’s first science professor, on “The Cholera, God’s Scourge.” Drawing on his Presbyterianism, Scott explained that cholera was “a divine judgment upon men on account of their sins,” and noted that the specter of this plague, “confounds the wisdom and skill of the faculty.” God was infuriated, he deduced, by slavery, the mistreatment of Native Americans, and other manifestations of our national exceptionalism. Dr. Scott recommended that we “humble ourselves and repent of our sins as a nation . . . and especially as individuals,” as a “precautionary measure.” The strategy failed: ten residents of Oxford died from cholera in 1834, and hundreds more in a second epidemic.

The bacterium that caused cholera was identified some years after Dr. Scott’s lecture. In our time, we have learned, with comparable certainty, that the incineration of fossil fuels has flooded the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and that this is roasting the planet. Having crossed the vast gulf of the monkish and deluded past, there is no need to indict a brumous deity for this mess. This is on us, completely. All of our ancestors contributed to the ruination of nature, the more recent ones picked up the pace, and we are the unfortunate participants in the completion of this tragedy. There may be time for a graceful exit plan, but we need to accept the science, embrace our culpability, and consider the significance of the changing climate in everything we study.

Hurricane molds

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 10:11:16 GMT

Reasonable and unreasonable concerns about indoor mold

Storm damage comes in many forms. Outbreaks of black mold in flooded properties will be among the more insidious consequences of the hurricane season. The internet is abuzz with commentaries on this phenomenon and much of it is misinformed nonsense. Here is the truth. Microorganisms of many stripes will always flourish in water-damaged homes. Fungi, including species with jet-black pigmentation, are among the easiest to recognize as they speckle walls and damage carpeting and upholstery. After a few days of mold development the smell is unmistakable too and reason enough to get rid of the fungus. The potential health impact is a more important cause for concern and this is where the confusion begins. Mold exposure is a serious issue because it is a proven stimulus of asthma and other allergic illnesses. With asthma affecting 25 million Americans and its involvement in more than 3,000 deaths every year, this needs to be taken very seriously. Contact with the molds growing on walls and carpets comes via the inhalation of microscopic spores that carry irritating proteins on their surface. This causes histamine release in the lungs and results in airway constriction.

The spores of a minority of mold species carry powerful toxins, which raises the possibility that they may play a role in other illnesses. Tissue damage caused by these mycotoxins has been documented in livestock exposed to massive numbers of fungal spores, but similar conditions are unlikely to develop in a flooded home. Some investigators concluded that cases of lung bleeding in infants in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1990s, were caused by the inhalation of black mold spores. This possibility, however remote, helps sustain internet gossip implicating mold in depression, memory loss, organ failure, brain damage, and cancer.

Given the seriousness of asthma, drying and cleaning materials that become covered with mold is important. Some of this can be done by homeowners themselves following the clear instructions offered by the EPA:

https://www.epa.gov/mold/floods-and-mold-growth

More significant damage to a property requires the removal and replacement of carpets, furniture, and drywall. This can be a very costly business, but people should be very wary of claims made about “toxic black mold” and expensive remediation services that offer anything more than fixing the spoiled fabric of a property. A detailed inventory of the species of microorganisms in a basement will not help a family recover their home.

We need to get better at this. Hurricanes and mold spores are going to become more problematic as the planet warms. Models of climate change predict an increase in the frequency of major storms and there is nothing that fungi love more than a warm bath.

Are humans an endangered species?

moneynp@miamioh.edu (Nik Money) — Thu, 25 May 2017 17:25:02 GMT

Considered with the kind of objective methods employed by biologists to describe other animals, humans emerge as a most peculiar kind of primate. Our babies seem no smarter than other apes, but by the time we are toddlers the differences are profound. The descended position of the larynx along with other anatomical and neurological adaptations have allowed us to develop sophisticated communication methods ranging from our original African languages of clicking sounds to the extended vocal range required for “Muzetta’s Waltz” from La Boheme . Besides these, and other, biomechanical characteristics, attempts at an holistic description of Homo sapiens embrace our recurring cultural habits of agriculture, politics, trade, materialism, warfare, art, science, and religion.

The IUCN Red List places Homo sapiens in the conservation category of “Least Concern,” and offers the following justification: Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline. The durability of this assessment should be considered along with this excerpt from a Latin description of our species that may be adopted by extraterrestrial taxonomists that visit earth in the twenty-second century: Homo sapiens: illa simiae species Africana ab origine quae adeo orbem pervastavit terrarum ut ipsa extincta fiat. Or, Homo sapiens: species of ape of African origin that devastated the biosphere and thereby drove its own extinction.

The white ferula mushroom is critically endangered

moneynp@miamioh.edu (Nik Money) — Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This prized edible fungus has been picked for centuries and alarmingly few fruit bodies reach maturity before they are gathered today.

More than 70,000 species of fungi have been described by fungal biologists, or mycologists, and given Latin names. The pace of new descriptions and the discovery of the genetic signatures of unknown species of fungi in soil and in insect guts, suggest that the real number of species may run above one million. Zoologists have recorded around 70,000 vertebrates and half of these are fish. The IUCN lists 1,601 of these animals as critically endangered, but just two fungi. Many of the fungi studied by mycologists are very widespread, which means that they are unlikely to face extinction any time soon. Other fungi are so poorly studied that we have no way to judge their vulnerability. The white ferula mushroom, Pleurotus nebrodensis, is the only mushroom on the critical list; the other fungus is a lichen.

White ferula mushrooms grow in an area of 100 square kilometers in the northern part of Sicily and nowhere else. This prized edible fungus has been picked for centuries and alarmingly few fruit bodies reach maturity before they are gathered today. The IUCN listing of Pleurotus has helped activists to introduce regulations against picking the mushroom in Sicily. The white ferula mushroom gets its common name from its association with the roots of a plant in the celery family called Cachrys ferulacea. This symbiotic relationship, called a mycorrhiza, supports the fungus and the plant. Sicilian biologists are inoculating Cachrys roots with the fungus to establish more of the fruiting colonies. Conservation by farming the endangered mushroom is comparable to breeding rhinos and tigers in zoos.

Update: Pleurotus nebrodensis was listed as Critically Endangered in 2006. Two additional species received this ignominious award in 2015: Bridgeoporus nobilissimus, bracket fungus that lives on fir trees in old growth forests, and Destuntzia rubra, a truffle. Both species have been decimated by habitat loss in the Pacific Coast of the United States. The only other fungi on the critical list are a pair of lichens.