the sound of claws on cobblestone

“The anthropologists Natasha Myers and Carla Hustak argue that the word evolution, which literally means “rolling outward,” doesn’t capture the readiness of organisms to involve themselves in one another’s lives. Myers and Hustak suggest that the word involution—from the word involve—better describes this tendency: a “rolling, curling, turning inward.” In their view, the concept of involution better captures the entangled pushing and pulling of “organisms constantly inventing new ways to live with and alongside one another.” It was their tendency to involve themselves in the lives of others that enabled plants to borrow a root system for fifty million years while they evolved their own. Today, even with their own root systems, almost all plants still depend on mycorrhizal fungi to manage their underground lives. Their involutionary tendencies enabled fungi to borrow a photosynthesizing alga to handle their atmospheric affairs. They still do. Mycorrhizal fungi are not built into plant seeds. Plants and fungi must constantly form and re-form their relationships. Involution is ongoing and extravagant: By associating with one another, all participants wander outside and beyond their prior limits.”