14 October

Got lichen on your roof? Lichens are amazing things, that may provide a model for understanding everything in our world. Lichens are not a single organism. They’re a symbiosis of multiple organisms. Evidence is increasingly suggesting that every living and non-living thing is a symbiosis. For example about 50% of the genes in your body actually come from species outside it. Symbiosis is such a different model for understanding everything because instead of starting with separate ‘bits’, like people or plants or rocks or trees, or cars or words or political parties, it starts by saying that everything is already a mixture. Mixtures aren’t separate bits, mixed together. Those bits are mixtures too.