This process is in many ways similar to selection in genetics: "Within the lifetime of the individual organism, behavior is selected by its consequences, much as organisms are selected over generations by evolutionary contingencies" [ 89].
Most are merely the surface features — the strange fruit — of much larger organisms known as mycelia.
But fungi are much larger organisms than the short-lived "toadstool" that we typically see.
"At that point, you can make disposable biological systems that don't have to produce offspring, and you can make much simpler organisms".
Geneticists needed much simpler organisms, like bacteria and the viruses that prey on them, in which to work out the molecule-level events of DNA metabolism.
For instance Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt, both of the Santa Fe Institute, found that cities scale much like organisms.
The large clumps of yellow-brown mushrooms that appear above ground are the fruiting bodies of much larger organisms.
Stephan Schuster from Penn State University, who led the mammoth sequencing project, says, "Even the genomes from much younger organisms rapidly decay.
This was the problem by which so many people had been puzzled ever since the completion of the human genome sequence failed to find a larger number of protein-coding genes in humans than in much simpler organisms.
