a philosophical critique of the 2020 book 'Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures'
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
July 14, 2025
Merlin Sheldrake's book "Entangled Life1" is full of unsupported metaphysical nods to the all-powerful nature of a strictly utilitarian-focused evolution. In the course of just a few pages, the author repeatedly doffs his cap to the unbridled powers of random changes in nature:
"Spores evolved to allow fungi to disperse themselves." (p. 30)
"Truffle fungi have evolved to make animals giddy because their lives depend on it. (p. 30)
"Some species of tropical rainforest orchid have evolved to mimic the smell, shape, and color of mushrooms to attract mushroom-loving flies. (p. 35)
If you say so, Merlin.
None of these claims comes with an annotation, of course. This is apparently because evolutionary metaphysics is considered non-debatable these days and so no longer in need of any proof. Everything came about for utilitarian purposes and there is no meaning or poetry or spirituality in life: case closed.
This is precisely how the metaphysical belief in God used to function in the scientific world: it was taken as a given that things came about purposefully, through a kind of teleology, and it was considered impious to attempt to dispute that metaphysical assumption. Today, the privileged metaphysics has changed, but it remains as dangerous as ever to question the status quo presumptions.
The proof of the metaphysical nature of Sheldrake's bald-faced assertions about the omnipotence and omnipresence of evolutionary powers can be seen by performing a thought experiment. Merely replace the phrase "had evolved" in the book with the phrase "was created by God" and the reader would be none the wiser. In either case we are told nothing concrete except that the author has a certain metaphysical belief when it comes to the origins of life, one that he believes in so completely that he does not feel the need to defend it. Such hat-doffing to materialist theory is what Michael Behe calls "the pretense of knowledge" in his 2019 book "Darwin Devolves: the new science about DNA that challenges evolution.2"
A sibling of mine once challenged me on this, asking me, "Yes, Brian, but how else COULD the world of plant, fungi and animal life have come about except by blind, meaningless evolution?" I did not miss a beat in responding to that challenge as follows: "That is the whole problem, my friend. A metaphysical view is not justified merely because our avowedly nihilistic and atheistic materialists can imagine no alternative theories with which they are comfortable. What we have here is a lack of imagination disguised as 'proof'."
Please note this important but nuanced distinction:
I am not saying that Sheldrake's metaphysics is wrong: merely that it IS metaphysics and it should be treated as such. It should be discussed in detail in a philosophically oriented tome, not mentioned repeatedly without references as an all-purpose and all-powerful explanation for every innovation on the biological front. In this annotation-free name-dropping on behalf of a presumably omnipotent metaphysics, Sheldrake is essentially telling his readers (over and over again, lest they fail to get the message): "Remember, reader: there is only one way to see all this diversity of nature about which I am writing here: namely, as something that could not have been other than it is, as the necessary utilitarian result of a mindless and fundamentally pointless process. In other words, we should ideally cease to marvel at Mother Nature entirely, knowing that it could not have been otherwise."
This might be a hard sell for indigenous people, but then the west has always approached their world with a cynical eye toward exploiting its riches in the name of that ruthless utilitarianism for which evolutionary theory stands.
Of course, suggesting that evolutionary theory is metaphysics is the ultimate sin in science, and well-heeled groups are doing all they can to outlaw that viewpoint and to defame its supporters as troglodytes. Yet no less a philosopher than Thomas Nagel pushed back against this dogmatic bullying of Darwinian critics in 2012 with his tellingly titled book: "Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false." In this gauntlet tossing Swan Song, Nagel reacts as follows to the scientific establishment's trashing of "intelligent design" researchers like Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and David Berlinski:
"Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair." --Thomas Nagel, from Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false, p. 103
This has obvious connections to the subject of drugs, by the way. We have placed mind and mood medicine in the hands of materialist science, a science that embraces passion-scorning behaviorism and sees the individual as a chemically determined widget under the influence of a mindless evolution. It is this world view that has turned me into a patient for life by denying me common-sense godsends that could cheer me up in a trice and instead shunted me off onto dependence-causing medicines whose use is "justified" by reductionist metaphysics, the same reductionist metaphysics embraced by evolution boosters.
This is a very fraught topic, however, philosophically speaking. Whenever I fail to declare my full unqualified faith in evolutionary theory, I seem to be lying in the same bed with my enemies on many other important subjects, as, for instance, Behe's books are championed by the agenda-driven Washington Times, which champions the insurrectionist mindset and the drug-war mentality of substance demonization. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that I am not saying that evolutionary theory does not have potential explanatory power -- merely that our state of ignorance about life is far too profound viz. ultimate causes for us to opine ex cathedra and annotation-free about how life came about, a hubris that Sheldrake evinces on every other page of his otherwise literally down-to earth analysis of the world of mycelium.
When it comes to theories like evolution, I share the view of David Bohm as put forth in his 1980 book "Wholeness and the Implicate Order":
"All theories are insights, which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains, and unclear when extended beyond these domains.4"
If this makes me a heretic, then persecute at will! Fortunately, I am one of the few philosophers in the world who is in a position wherein he has nothing to lose by being honest.
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.
SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.
If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"
I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.
The Drug War brought guns to the "hoods," thereby incentivizing violence in the name of enormous profits. Any site featuring victims of gun violence should therefore be rebranded as a site featuring victims of the drug war.
Aleister Crowley actually TRIED to get addicted to drugs and found he could not. These things are not inevitable. The fact that there are town drunkards does not mean that we should outlaw alcohol.
The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."
All uplifting drugs are potential antidepressants. Science denies that fact by claiming that drug efficacy must be proven quantitatively. And so they ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
Freud thought cocaine was a great antidepressant. His contemporaries demonized the drug by focusing only on the rare misusers. That's like judging alcohol by focusing on alcoholics.