Show Notes
As fictional Santa Fe Institute chaos mathematician Ian Malcolm famously put it, “Life finds a way” — and this is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than by roots: seeking out every opportunity, improving in their ability to access and harness nutrients as they’ve evolved over the last 400 million years. Roots also exemplify another maxim for living systems: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” As the Earth’s climate has transformed, the plants and fungi have transformed along with it, reaching into harsh and unstable environments and proving themselves in a crucible of evolutionary innovation that has reshaped the biosphere. Dig deep enough and you’ll find that life, like roots, trends toward the ever-finer, more adaptable, more intertwined…we all live in and on Charles Darwin’s “tangled bank”, whether we recognize it in our farms, our markets, or our minds. Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe. This week on Complexity, we talk to SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Mingzhen Lu (Google Scholar, Twitter) about the lessons of the invisible webwork beneath our feet, the hidden world upon which all of us walk and rely — largely unnoticed, and until recently scarcely understood. We discuss the intersection of geography, ecology, and economics; the relationship between the so-called “Wood-Wide Web” and urban systems; how plants domesticated mycorrhizal fungi much as humans domesticated animals and plants; the evolutionary trends revealed by a paleoecological study of roots and what they suggest for the future of technology and civilization… This episode is an especially intertwingled and far-reaching one, as suits the topic. Plant yourself and soak it up! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe to Complexity Podcast wherever you prefer to listen, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts, and/or consider making a donation at santafe.edu/give. You'll find plenty of other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage. Thank you for listening! Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode. Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano. Follow us on social media: Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedIn Discussed in this episode: “Evolutionary history resolves global organization of root functional traits” by Zeqing Ma, Dali Guo, Xingliang Xu, Mingzhen Lu, Richard D. Bardgett, David M. Eissenstat, M. Luke McCormack & Lars O. Hedin in Nature “Global plant-symbiont organization and emergence of biogeochemical cycles resolved by evolution-based trait modelling” by Mingzhen Lu, Lars O. Hedin in PubMed “Biome boundary maintained by intense belowground resource competition in world’s thinnest-rooted plant community” by Mingzhen Lu, William J. Bond, Efrat Sheffer, Michael D. Cramer, Adam G. West, Nicky Allsopp, Edmund C. February, Samson Chimphango, Zeqing Ma, Jasper A. Slingsby, and Lars O. Hedin in PNAS Complexity ep. 8 - Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary History A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth by Henry Gee (Senior Editor of Nature) "General statistical model shows that macroevolutionary patterns and processes are consistent with Darwinian gradualism” by SFI Professor Mark Pagel in Nature Complexity ep. 29 - On Coronavirus, Crisis, and Creative Opportunity with David Krakauer “Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions” by SFI Professor Alison Gopnik in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B Complexity ep. 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West Complexity ep. 17 - Chris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & Evolution Complexity ep. 60 - Andrea Wulf on The Invention of Nature, Part 1: Humboldt's Naturegemälde Do Androids Dre
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