Monday, March 18, 2024

What happened? LA Mushroom Club (3/18)

LAMS Resident Mycologist Rudy Diaz (lamushrooms.org); Jen B, Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation) (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly


WHAT HAPPENED?

Read this, Rudy. You'll like it.
Very academic in a peculiar way, this presenter is a dandy, a British professorial type, a don with a stutter and the off-putting habit of constantly amusing himself under his breath -- with an insider's "You wouldn't get it" laugh -- holding his finger under his chin. He's an old-timey (past life) identity trapped in a youngish body pursuing his old academic habits; it's an odd combo, which made it hard to absorb his point if he had one. He knows many mycological terms, a dense jargon for any newcomer. The minutiae of distinctions is astounding and growing.

Suffice it to say, biological organisms are different, and they're different partly because of their genome (nature) and partly because of their environment (nurture), but as there is no organism without an environment, we'll just have to see what we find. And what we find are mushrooms that are so (phenotypically) different that one would never guess they're related (genotypically). But they are.
  • One great moment in science further proved the secret lives of plants. They're "conscious" insofar as they know and respond to their environment. There's a kind of tree with jagged pointed edges and little pokers along the perimeter of its ovate leaf. Some leaves are perfectly smooth. These leaves are on the same tree, even the same branch. The only ones that deploy (manifest, form) their genetic potential for thorniness are the ones subjected to grazing. The epigenetics of the plant tell it to bring forward this dormant potential for thistle-like pokers.
  • MORPHOLOGY OF FLOWERING PLANTS PowerPoint Presentation, ID:1143949 (slideserve.com)
Take one common gilled mushroom as an example. It has the typical phallic shape with gills under the umbrella head. Now raise that genetically exact mushroom in a cold temperature and it becomes a coral type mushroom without gills, almost a polypore (many tiny holes that release spores rather than papery flaps). This can be done in the lab, and it can happen in nature when it's cold. This is due to its epigenetics ("above genetics"), that part of the genome that tells the rest of the genome what to express of its many genetic potentials. You know, whether you get sick with some genetic illness that runs in your family has more to do with epigenetics then genetics, for it does not matter what's in their; it matters what gets expressed. How does the epi decide what to tell the genetics?

The environment (circumstances it meets in life) decides. The environment informs, and the epi decides, and the genes are just the coded instructions of which proteins to build once they are pulled and selected by the epi to express.

The much more interesting Buddhist philosophical question was never answered. Nor was the equally Buddhist question about, How does emptiness become form? That is, how does what has no form suddenly take a form? Biological organisms begin as soup with Brownian motion then they self-segregate into parts, and no one knows how or why. I wanted to ask if a kind of "spirit," because we no better name for it yet, isn't the cause, and what I would have meant to say was: When Kirlian photography is done, which is a kind of objective measure, one can take a living leaf, subject it to the photographical process and see all these energy patterns around the leaf like it's electrified. That's nice, because it's alive and were seeing its sort of "aura" or surrounding energy field. Now, cut that leaf. If the electrified field were just following the perimeter, we should see half the leaf now. But we do not. We still see the whole leaf. It's like there's a magnet behind a sheet of white paper upon which are strewn iron filings. What shape will those filings take? Just random? Not on your life. They will take the shape of the magnet's magnetic field. Cut those filings in two, separating half from the other half in a line. Will they stay that way? Not on your life. All of the remaining filings will keep the shape of the magnet exerting its invisible influence, its spirit, its ghost, its unseen cause of the visible manifestation. It's not magic though it can appear magical until we nail down the mechanism, at which point it becomes "common sense."

Here's the interesting Buddhist philosophical question at the root of the talk: Imagine a photograph of an axe. It is composed of two main parts, a wood handle and a metal cutting part. Now further imagine that this is my grandfather's old, trusty, beloved heirloom axe handed down to me. I whack a long and the handle breaks. IF I get a new handle for it, is it the same axe? Of course. I mean, it's the spirit of what my grandfather handed down to me with changeable wooden handles.

Okay, then I become a grandfather and hand that same axe to my grandson. He whacks it and the metal part breaks. He replaces it. Is it the same axe? Ugh, yes? Sure, it's the same, except with one problem: nothing of it, not one molecule of what my grandfather handed down remains, so how could it be the same axe? We still call it by the same name, "Grandpa's axe," but there isn't an atom of the original remaining. And say time is not a factor. Say, I break it the day I get it and replace the broken piece and then whack again and break the other piece and replace it. Is it the same axe? Of course not. It's two new/foreign pieces coming together in place of the original; it is in no way the original. Funny how time gave the illusion that it transitioned slowly into the same axe as the foreign part got assimilated, isn't it?

(This was pointed out by the Buddha with much more grave and alarming consequences when he realized that the "soul," the "self," the "personality," the "individual," the "ego," the "spirit," the "essence" of a person was a composite of five parts, all of them changing at every moment, unsatisfactory, and impersonal. These five categories (with piles of elements) are this body (my form, which is composed of the four great elements called materiality or the characteristics of physical particles called kalapas); and this "mind," composed of four elements or categories: feelings, perceptions, formations, and consciousness (a stream of mind-moments or cittas and therefore more a process than a noun, so that when science asks, "What is consciousness?" it has already erred in assuming it's a thing when it's actually an empty process of ever-moving, ever-altering, dying parts coming to cessation at every moment). So where's the self? So if I'm this self at this moment, what am "I" the next moment? The Buddha goes into much more intricate detail in the Abhidharma, and The Heart Sutra does a much more succinct job of condensing 100,000 lines of explanation in the Perfection of Wisdom literature or Prajna Paramita. Mind you, this is not a belief, not an article of faith as some might be inclined to treat it because the Buddha said it. It is an ultimate truth to be tested and verified. It does one very little good to know it as a concept, and has the potential for much harm if grasped incorrectly, because it is meant to be penetrated, known-and-seen, realized by insight).

The speaker, Rudy Diaz, brought up the paradox of the axe, but he just amused himself in doing so, nervously laughing and moving on. It is not the same axe but, more surprising than that, it was never the axe to begin with, given that it was in every iteration composed of miniscule impermanent parts arising, turning, and passing away, exchanging ions, spinning, decaying. In Buddhism this general awareness is called namarupa, "name-and-form," mind and body, or idea and substance. A substance is seen and given a name, an ideation.

A mushroom is spotted, it's described and categorized, written up, and later reclassified with a new name, and this is going on all the time. It will never end because it is really begging questions that the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein tackled in Philosophical Investigations. Diaz didn't mention any of this, but my cognitive and Buddhist psychology professor at UC Berkeley sure did. She would never shut up about Wittgenstein (Vit-ken-sshstein) this, Wittgenstein that, for he understood that the real question was: Are there natural categories or arbitrary one, real ones or just the ones we make up? Our intuition is that there are natural ones, and we're just discovering them. But humans categorize things differently and, in any society, reasonable people will disagree as to what is in or belongs in a category and what does not.

We are not seeing objective reality, and we never have been seeing it. When we become fully enlightened, will we? We can hope, but that's not at all clear. One may just use the categories people already believe in to try to teach them something, knowing that it's all arbitrary, or perhaps natural categories do exist but change over time. Maybe something was like that then and is like this now? It's not impossible. So all of biology is just a p*ssing contest among mostly men pursuing their pet theories and advocating for them with their power of persuasion until they die or some upstart comes along and pushes a new view. What's all this got to do with mushrooms? There are no universally agreed upon objective measures by which to categorize.

Goodness knows, perhaps an edible mushroom in a different environment becomes inedible or poisonous or foul tasting, and maybe a poisonous one becomes innocuous. Surely, over time, things change. They change, we change, the science (methods or standards of investigation) change, and all of this causes an interaction effect. None of it is stable. So do mycology, that is, study mushrooms, but don't expect hard and fast rules. And come to the next general meeting, which looks more interesting.

Visit a Los Angeles Mycological Society (LAMS) general meeting after February's very successful annual Wild Mushroom Fair at the LA Arboretum.

Meeting details

PROGRAM: "Mushroom Abnormalities and Metaphysics of Identity" with guest speaker LAMS Resident Mycologist Rudy Diaz. FREE. RSVP:

What do we know about mushrooms?
Living organisms are unique in that they show goal-oriented chemical actions that achieve self-maintenance and replication.

Although they give the appearance of direction, these functions are fulfilled through the random motions of molecules.

The central questions in biology, "the study of life," derive from a strange phenomenon, the emergence of “form” from “non-form.” It's like Buddhism's Heart Sutra says, "Form is emptiness just as emptiness is form..."

Fungi, displaying remarkable tolerance for aberrations in form, serve as a window into basic properties of complex traits and their evolution.

In order to make sense of these “traits” in a genetic context, it is necessary to reevaluate assumptions made about how life operates in general.

Specifically, in asking the question “Why does this mushroom look abnormal?” we are confronted with a more intimidating question: “How can separate individuals look the same?”

The common answer claims that genes encode a “program” for the construction of forms. By sharing the “same” genes, two individuals follow the same program.

Inky cap about to go black
However, the genetic control of biological traits is not predetermined (Diaz et al., 2023). Rather, it is more appropriate to view similarities between individuals of a species as owing to genetic (i.e., informational) “constraints.”

In mushroom (fruiting body)-forming fungi, loose-enough constraints on development seem to have allowed many instances of repeated evolution in reproductive forms.

More info about LAMS events, including a biography of this month's speaker, is available on the LAMS Calendar page. Directions to location at the community center: LAMS Locations

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