I suppose it's useful to rein in those of us so relieved to learn about symbiosis that we talk as if the competition that animates natural selection is passé, but it could have been a little subtler. Of course, as Merlin Sheldrake (briefly cited in the article) lays out in Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, symbiosis is a spectrum from parasitism to true mutuality - and no species does things that aren't ultimately in its own interest. For this reason, Sheldrake contests the "Wood Wide Web" moniker coined by editors at Nature for Suzanne Simard's work. Fungi are not hapless and guileless conduits for the communication of plants, like fiberoptic cables. (For that matter, the World Wide Web isn't a guileless vessel either, as we have learned to our peril!)
Yet that isn't the end of it but the start of it. Competition vs. symbiosis reproduces a naive view where species aren't already all tangled up with each other to begin with. Communication happens all the time, not much of it friendly. As Kathryn Flinn, one of the people cited in the Times article, notes in an opinion piece for Scientific American,
Do trees really talk? Sure. Plants emit hormones and defense signals. Other plants detect these signals and alter their physiology accordingly. But not all the talk is kind; plants also produce allelochemicals, which poison their neighbors. ...
Reciprocity among trees is possible, but many interactions are likely asymmetric, such as between mature trees and tiny seedlings. ...
Interestingly, when mycorrhizae transfer resources from a native grass to an invasive weed, this is interpreted as evidence of parasitism, not cooperation.
Overemphasizing cooperation is misleading. The forest floor is a forum of fierce competition. A mature maple tree produces millions of seeds, and on average only one will grow to reach the canopy. The rest will die, with or without help from mom.
Amid this struggle, trees can sometimes facilitate each other’s growth. But this does not mean that a forest functions like one organism. An ecosystem comprises an ever-changing diversity of organisms having an ever-changing variety of interactions, positive and negative.
It's good to be reminded of the allelochemicals and the millions of fruitless maple seeds, a reality I particularly find obscured in the feel-good tracts of Peter Wohlleben, and sentimental appropriations of Simard's' "mother trees." But Flinn goes on to argue that any symbiotic relationship would have to be the result of "group selection," a rarity always trumped in the struggle for survival by individual selection, and something that would take more time than the reality of the "ever-changing diversity of organisms" in a forest would allow. And yet collaboration is the name of the game: no being can survive without engaging in it pretty much all the time, at least at the wheeling-dealing level of the mycorrhizae. If "group selection" can't account for it where it happens, perhaps we need an appreciation of "emergence," or of "self-organizing systems."
I resonate with Flinn's anti-anthropomorphic conclusion:
[L]et’s seek to understand plants on their own terms. Plants are fundamentally unlike us: mute, rooted and inscrutable. We need to meet the challenge of cultivating respect for organisms that are different from us—in their separate and complex bodies, in their sophisticated interactions, in their unfathomable lives.
But I think that learning about plants might help us understand ourselves as fundamentally unlike the way we imagine we are. We may not be "mute, rooted and inscrutable" but that doesn't make us articulate, free and transparent, or unentangled with the rest of life.
