Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 'words', scientist claims (2022)

This feels like the "we share 50% of our genes with bananas" factoid.

Considering humans have 3.1 billion base pairs and the most fungi have 30-300 million, I'm not sure how this could be true without some major caveats. Admittedly, a lot of our DNA is considered "junk" - though whether it all is or not is a question.

(the banana one is that they're talking specifically about protein coding genes which makes up about 2% of our DNA)

The branch that has evolved towards animals has developed multi-cellularity while retaining their ancestral lifestyle of eating other living beings, which is a lifestyle that requires mobility.

The branch that has evolved towards fungi has adapted to a terrestrial life, unlike the branch that has evolved towards animals in the oceans.

To avoid desiccation on land, the fungi have developed a chitinous cell wall. This has solved the desiccation problem, but this wall has made the fungal cells immobile. So they had to change their lifestyle from the ancestral lifestyle of the eukaryotes to a lifestyle similar to that of the heterotrophic bacteria, i.e. fungi do not eat food by engulfing it, like animals, but they grow into food, by secreting enzymes that break the food into small molecules, which can be then absorbed by the fungal cells.

While there exists only a single group of living beings like the animals, which are both multicellular and mobile, there are several groups like the fungi, besides the true fungi. All such fungous organisms have immobile cells with cell walls, so if they are multicellular they must grow into food in the form of a branched network, in order to maximize the surface of contact between them and food.

The other groups of living beings that look like fungi, but which are not true fungi, are not closely related to animals. The most important of those groups is related to the brown algae, but there is even a group of bacteria that look like fungi, the actinomycetes. Besides the other living beings that feed like fungi, so they look like mycelia (branched networks), there are even more groups of living beings that do not feed like fungi, so most of the time they do not look like fungi, but which are terrestrial like fungi, so they must use the same method of spore dispersion by wind, so they grow mushroom-like bodies for the launch of spores, e.g. the slime molds.

Now if your definition of language is something arrogant like “a system of communication where combinations of tokens are given semantic meaning that correspond with conscious states and phenomena” then I would say that is incredibly limiting and ignores the preponderance of language all around you both in nature and technology. If someone builds a computer that can parse x86 assembly, it doesn’t cease to be parsing language if I stipulate that humans never existed and this computer just happens to exist. The tree still falls in the forest even if there is no human consciousness there to perceive it and the same goes for language. If it is encoded by something and decoded by something else fairly consistently (fuzzy is fine if the communication is still generally effective) then you have language.

More importantly the existence of unconscious systems that can generate and parse sentences in arbitrary languages means consciousness isn’t very relevant or necessary when analyzing language and perhaps focusing on it too much actually gets in the way of meaningful research and discovery.

Truly random tappings on a tree are not language, but if a type of bird signals that predators are nearby by striking a tree with their beak with consistent rules that are understood by other birds or creatures, then you have language. But you would have us not study these things because you think they are beneath us. I would instead say we are nothing special, and thus everything is special, or at least historically we always miss out on scientific insight when we arrogantly assume humans have X but other life forms do not.