b. 1955 · A portrait
A largely self-taught mycologist argues underground fungal networks function like an information system, comparing them to neural nets and the internet. Researchers who study these networks say the comparison runs ahead of the evidence.
The line above is how his claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.
Stamets founded Fungi Perfecti, a mushroom cultivation company, building over four decades of practical work in cultivation and mycoremediation — using fungi to help break down pollutants in soil — later covered by patents and peer-reviewed papers.
In this book Stamets argued fungal mycelium functions as a natural information-processing network comparable to neural tissue or the internet, extending his cultivation work into a broader claim about how fungi communicate underground.
Mycorrhizal ecologist Justine Karst and colleagues reviewed the published field evidence for forest-wide fungal networks in Nature Ecology & Evolution, finding the claims rested on only a couple of tested forest types and that popular accounts had overinterpreted the results.
The threads themselves, and his cultivation and mycoremediation work, are well established. The internet-like network claim he has popularized remains, by the review's own account, well ahead of what forest ecology has actually tested.