DR ROWAN HOOPER - HOW SYMBIOSIS MADE OUR WORLD
James Kennedy speaks with evolutionary biologist, author, and editor Dr. Rowan Hooper about his book Togetherness. They explore how symbiosis drives complex life—from leafcutter ants and underground fungal networks to the human gut microbiome—while challenging "survival of the fittest" stereotypes to advocate for a cooperative relationship with the natural world
James Kennedy: Rowan, thanks so much for joining us, brother. How you doing?
Rowan Hooper: I'm good, James. Good to be here.
James Kennedy: Great to have you with us, man. Honestly, I've got so many things I could ask you, but I don't have you all week, so I'm going to try and keep this within the confines of the book, your amazing new book Togetherness, which is out now. It's super fascinating stuff. For those who haven't yet read it, how would you describe the basic premise of the book?
Rowan Hooper: The idea—it's all about symbiosis, which is what scientists call when two different species live together. So it's not just being together in some fluffy way, like a bee might pollinate a flower—that's not symbiosis. It's living together very, very intimately. And this turns out to happen much more than people, even biologists, really know. It happens all over the world, all organisms do it in one way or another, and it's responsible really for the evolution of complex life, the maintenance of all ecosystems on the planet. And if we don't understand it and get to grips with what it's doing, then we're not going to be able to transition to a sustainable way of life in the future. So it's super important, it's super prevalent throughout the world.
James Kennedy: Yeah, and you give lots of examples of this symbiosis throughout the book, and some of them are quite interesting and bizarre, almost, aren't they? Some of them are quite surprising. Would it be okay to give us a few examples of this symbiosis in nature, some of the ones that stand out to you as being a bit more interesting and surprising? Because some of them are quite out there, aren't they?
Rowan Hooper: Well, they are. Okay, let's start with lichen, right? So that's not something that will blow people's minds straight away. People just think, "What is that? That's that stuff that you see on a gravestone or growing on a tree." But lichen is a kind of composite organism made of two different species, algae and fungi, that grow together and form something different. And it was actually the argument over what lichen is which led to the coining of the term symbiosis in the first place, a couple of hundred years ago. So, okay, that's cool, but lichen turns out to be absolutely everywhere in many different species, and it's like a pioneer species in different ecosystems. Which means it's one of the first species that you get growing in a virgin new area. Say if there's a volcanic eruption, everything's cleaned off, fresh lava cools down, and then you've got bare sterile rock—some of the first things that will colonize that are lichen. And the same with glaciers that we see more and more when glaciers retreat and you've just got bare rock underneath it, lichen is some of the first thing that comes in. It grows on rock, and it can grow in extreme conditions because it has this symbiosis between two completely different life forms, like a plant and a fungus growing together. It gets a kind of superpower from this combination of both of them. So it can survive in extreme conditions, it grows slowly, but it creates from the rock that it grows on—it starts to create soil. So over many hundreds, thousands, and then millions of years, you start to get soil building up. So everything that we rely on starts from the very slow decay and breakdown of rock by lichen. In the end, you start to get soil, and then other things can come in and grow in that soil: you get plants, trees, and then that will support a bigger ecosystem. Lichen is so easy to disregard, yet it's absolutely fundamental to literally the basis of our planet. So it's a really, really important organism. But also, just take a look at it with a magnifying glass—this is something I always tell people. If you peer down, get right close to it, it's really incredible. It's like a little rainforest, it's so complex and actually quite beautiful. There's many different species, many different kinds of it, and it's everywhere. It's something you don't have to go to some exotic place to see, it's pretty much everywhere. So go and take a look at it. So that's one: lichen. What's another one? Like orchids. Right at the moment, I'm seeing a lot of orchids around the place. They're the second biggest group of flowering plants, there's 28,000 species. Everyone sort of loves an orchid—beautiful plants, beautiful flowers. And yet, they only exist because of symbiosis. They can't grow without symbiosis with a fungus. So that ability to be able to grow with a fungus has unlocked this opportunity and power for orchids to be able to grow and diversify into thousands of different forms, thousands of different species. So that's another one. One more and then I'll let you come in again, right? Well, two more.
James Kennedy: Go for it, give it to us.
Rowan Hooper: Okay, it's fascinating. The mycelial network in forests and underneath—
James Kennedy: Yeah, yeah, well, we can come back to this again later on perhaps, but—
Rowan Hooper: So almost all trees and plants, their roots, when they go in the soil, form a connection with a fungal network that exists beneath our feet. What happens is the tree or the plant will make food from photosynthesis, it goes down into the roots, and it trades it with the fungi in the soil in return for nutrients, water, or something that the plant needs. So the fungus might need some food, the tree needs something else, and they'll swap this over. And this agreement, this symbiosis, is unbelievably prevalent. So I'm saying this a lot, but it happens all over the world. They've just made a really thorough estimate of the sheer extent of the fungal network underground that connects with the roots of different plants. If you put all the fungal threads in a line together all over the world, it's ridiculously long and complex. But if you could do it, it would go on for something like 12 light-years in length. There's so much of it.
James Kennedy: It is insane, it's nuts.
Rowan Hooper: There's this absolutely unfathomably complex network underground that's got some sort of trade agreement going on between plants and fungi. Okay, and the other one that I was going to say is also underground, and that's the legumes. So legumes are plants like beans, peas, pulses, lentils, all of those sorts of plants. On the roots, they have these nodules, like little balls of a special kind of bacteria which makes fertilizer by getting nitrogen from the air and turning it into ammonia that the plant uses as fertilizer. Because the plant can't do anything with the nitrogen in the air, but the bacteria can. So they have this arrangement where the bacteria make fertilizer for the plant, and then again, in return, the plant gives some food back to the bacteria in payment. So it's super important, and it happens in all legumes. It helps fertilize the plant that has the nodules, but also the rest of the soil, which is why farmers often will rotate the crops and put a leguminous crop on it—they'll sow clover, perhaps, for that year—and it helps fertilize and refresh the field for the next year. So in summary of all of that, symbiosis is just absolutely everywhere. We haven't even gotten to all of it yet; I haven't talked about ants, which is one of my favorite ones that is absolutely everywhere and super important for the functioning of life.
James Kennedy: It's fascinating, man, all of those examples. And then we've got to mention the ants as well, because, yeah, okay, the ants are incredible. The leafcutter ants, I'm guessing, is the most specific example?
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, yeah.
James Kennedy: And I was going to mention fungus as well. I mean, the mycelium networks and the interaction—fungus is like part of everything everywhere, isn't it?
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, it really is. Because this is going on all around us, and some scientists know about it and work on it, but they tend to be quite siloed. There'll be thorough, brilliant scientists who are working on the mycelial network and understanding how this arrangement happens between trees and fungus, but then they don't talk to people who are working on legumes and looking at the symbiosis there, or other forms of symbiosis in different parts of the ecosystem. So you mentioned ants, right? I can't remember how many ants there are on the planet, but it numbers in the trillions. Isn't it something like two and a half million ants per person? It's nuts, it's absolutely nuts, there's so many of them. And everything they do relies on symbiosis. If we didn't have ants, we'd be in a very bad place, basically. And yeah, you mentioned leafcutter ants. That's one of my favorite species. I went to Brazil when I was researching the book, and I went to the rainforest there. One night I was out and I found this big colony of leafcutter ants that had come out at night to process all the leaves off a bush, and I found them all trooping back to the nest, all carrying fragments of leaf. What they do—they take it back. No one actually knew for hundreds of years what they were doing. Darwin saw them and he thought, "Oh, they're just going to their nest to eat the leaf in safety." But what they're actually doing is taking it into their nest where they have a garden, a crop of fungus that they grow underground. They clean the leaf, feed it to the fungus, the fungus digests the leaf because the ants have lost the ability to do that, and then the ants eat the fungus—not all of it, but they eat some of it. But they help propagate the fungus, they clean the garden, they weed out other species that are growing there. So the fungus is happy to have some of it eaten because it gets a lovely, safe place to grow for the rest of it. And when the ants leave to make a new nest, they take the fungus with them. So it's a fantastic arrangement. It's been going on for hundreds of millions of years, it happens all over the place. But it was thrilling for me to witness this. I'd read about it over the years, and I just loved the whole process. To witness the phenomenon of stripping down a tree and taking it all back—it was amazing.
James Kennedy: I can imagine! What an interesting life, man.
Rowan Hooper: Oh well, I was really happy to see those ants, you know. Maybe not everyone will share such joy of seeing a whole load of ants, but for me, I really did like that.
James Kennedy: Oh man, I can imagine. The fact that these things happen in nature is just mind-blowing to me, you know? And ants are just such a fascinating example as well because of the way you see them operate like a military regime, you know? It's almost like they're consciously aware of what they're doing, but of course they're not. They're fulfilling their evolutionary role, but it does look like that from the outside, doesn't it?
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, well, it's really weird. Because I watched them for a long time in the rainforest, and after a while, I watched thinking, "Oh, what's going to happen?" In the end, it got too much; it was chucking it down, so I went in. When I went back the next morning when the rain had stopped, I noticed there were still piles of leaves that they'd cut and hadn't processed fully. Basically, they'd just called it off, right? They thought, "It's raining, lads, let me get back in." But how did that happen? How did that signal get processed? So there's so many weird things that go on when you start to really get into thinking about this stuff. Like you say, we can't answer that, but it did occur to me: what went on there last night when it chucked it down? I went in because I thought, "I'm not getting soaking wet," but then they also thought that as well.
James Kennedy: Yes, it's mental, man, absolutely mental. I gotta say, I'm very envious that you get to do all of this cool stuff and call it a job.
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, I know, I know. It was an absolute privilege to be able to take time to write this book. I was able to go to some great places, meet some amazing scientists who told me what they're doing, and then my job was to try to stitch it all together. But I really enjoyed doing this.
James Kennedy: Oh man, I bet! What an adventure. And there's so many great examples of this throughout the book, but I think one that people might also be able to relate to that's closer to home is the gut microbiome, where we've got an entire community living inside us without which we just couldn't function.
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's something like a trillion bacterial cells in and on our bodies, so they live on our skin as well as inside us, in our teeth, absolutely everywhere. And yeah, a bit like we've been talking about in other forms of symbiosis, it happens because the partner in the symbiosis brings an ability into the arrangement that the other partner doesn't have. So as the host, we're not able to do a lot of different digestion or produce a lot of the nutrients that we need. We can't do it on our own, but we have bacteria in our guts that do it for us, and in return, they get food. So we eat plenty of food, they get some of it, they live in our gut, and they digest our food and produce many different nutrients for us that we can't do on our own. But also, they produce lots of hormones as well. Probably people have heard of serotonin; it's a hormone that makes us feel good. But a huge amount of that—about 95% of that hormone—is made by bacteria in our gut. So our mood, our very mood, is influenced by the gut bacteria, not by our own cells. And I just find that really quite amazing, because what does it mean for who we are, right? We're getting quite deep in this conversation already, but that's what symbiosis does: what does it mean to be human when our very moods and our physiology are not all determined by human cells, but they're determined by—or certainly hugely influenced by—other species completely, completely different ones: bacteria? So it makes you question what it means to be an individual, and certainly an individual human. What does it mean to say that, because we're not just human cells, we're made by this symbiosis with other beings from a completely different realm of life. So I think that's something that's really profound, and it's important that we start to think about these things: what does it mean to be an individual?
James Kennedy: Yeah, well, I want to come on to that actually. That's hopefully the direction we're going to steer into, because as humans, we tend to think of ourselves outside of nature. But we're actually interwoven into this very delicate tapestry of the rest of the natural world. And a lot of our activities are doing a lot to destroy and dismantle that, but we can't survive without being subjected to that tapestry. I want to come on to all of that because there's a whole load of other subjects to come out of that as well.
Rowan Hooper: Well, no, that is really the driving force behind the book—it's exactly that. We have got into a position where we look at nature—you know, we watch a David Attenborough show and we go, "Oh, look at that, isn't nature beautiful over there on the TV?" Or we might go to a nature reserve and go, "Oh, let me get some nature." And we all enjoy doing that, right? But it means we do start to automatically think of nature as something that's over there. And it's not. Just the example of the microbiome tells us that we're part of something that's much more intimate than we think, much more important to who we are and how we live than we think. And I think the really important point as well is that that can sound quite hippy-dippy to say that sort of thing, right? And I've got nothing against that, that's fine, but it's also just saying it scientifically: actually, it's fact. Exactly, this is the thing—it's not woo, this is really what's going on. So I think that it's a really important part of the book to try to get that across: that nature is not something that's just, "Oh, that's nice over there," it's something that we are all part of. And ecology—the study of how different species live and interact with each other—has to be really appreciated for the vitally important science that it is. Because there's a horrible phrase that I think the Conservative Party started: "We're all in this together," you know? But in an ecological sense, everything is together, right? We're all connected, and things that we do have a real influence, and often a bad influence, on the rest of nature, and it will come back and bite us. We've managed just to get away with it for a long time, but we've done so much exploitation of nature without considering how we're connected to it, that we've got ourselves into a terrible crisis that we need to stop as soon as possible. So that again is part of what I'm trying to do by illustrating all these different threads, all these different parts of the tapestry that we're connected to.
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James Kennedy: Beautifully put, man. Yeah, well, I'm really glad that the conversation has waded into these areas, because I was hoping that we could touch on some of the existential connotations of togetherness, and I'd love to come back and talk to you about that. I got one last question on symbiosis before we move on: is it fair to say that on a real base molecular level, that it is this symbiosis in nature that actually drives the mechanics of evolution, for want of a better way of describing it? I mean, is it accurate to say that without this symbiosis, which just seems to be omnipresent all through nature, that life as we know it today just would not have evolved?
Rowan Hooper: Well, so the biggest thing that happened about two billion years ago on our planet was a symbiosis between two very basic life forms that were around for about two billion years. They're called bacteria, and another kind of simple organism called archaea that people for many years thought were also bacteria, but they're different. From the origin of life four billion years ago, for two billion years, there was only these bacteria and archaea on the whole planet. That's all we had, it was just this slime ball across the planet, primordial soup, made of just these millions, billions, trillions of simple cells, but not doing anything particularly interesting, right? And it would have gone on like that for another two billion years, or until whenever. But what happened was these two organisms joined together in something we call endosymbiosis. What happened was the archaeal cell engulfed one of the bacterial cells, and instead of eating it, which normally would happen, the bacterial cell survived inside the archaea, and that became what we have now in all our cells called mitochondria. Those cells are the ones that provide the power to our cells, and when I say "our," I mean all complex life: all humans, but also all plants, mushrooms, fish, trees, birds—everything you see around you is a complex life form, and it all has to thank this event that happened two billion years ago when an archaeal cell formed a symbiosis with a bacterial cell. All complex life stemmed from that single event. Because what happened when those two life forms came together—like we've been seeing in other examples—it unlocked an incredible opportunity, that access to power that the other cells didn't have. So working together in this symbiotic union unlocked all of complex life to suddenly be able to evolve over the next two billion years, and that unlocked the entire diversity of life, right? It's hard to overestimate or overstate how important that event was to life on Earth, second only to the actual origin of life that happened four and a bit billion years ago. Obviously, we wouldn't be anywhere without that, but only just a slight second in terms of importance was this symbiotic union that happened, which, as I say, unlocked all of the diversity of life and all of complex life to come.
James Kennedy: Mind blown, man!
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, well, there's another kind of this endosymbiosis. The one event was getting the mitochondria on board. The second one that was also super important was when these complex cells started to have loads more energy and started to develop, but then they themselves had another endosymbiosis event. They took in another cell—another bacterial cell went into this complex cell. This was a bacteria called a cyanobacteria, which works through photosynthesis: it grows through photosynthesis, getting light from the sun and making food out of the air and water. And what the complex life form did was take a cyanobacteria into its cell, and that became plants. So plants work because they have these chloroplasts in the cell which make food from photosynthesis. But those chloroplasts used to be free-living bacteria on their own, and in another endosymbiosis event, they were engulfed into complex cells. Because of that, we get all plants, right? And that obviously transformed the entire structure of the whole planet itself, and the atmosphere changed completely as well. That then allowed animals to evolve, because then we could breathe oxygen that was made by the plants. So the first one was mitochondria, which unlocked the pathway to all complex life, and the second one was the origin of plants by this event that brought chloroplasts and allowed photosynthesis to happen in these complex cells.
James Kennedy: Man, it's absolutely insane. I mean, how do you wrap your head around the idea that symbiosis is basically the seed of all natural life? I keep saying mind-blowing, but I don't know how else to describe it.
Rowan Hooper: No, I'm glad it's blowing your mind, because it is. It's so fundamental to the evolution and operation of life that I think people need to know this and appreciate it more. It's not just really cool and fascinating stuff, but it's really important that we know this stuff as well.
James Kennedy: 100%, man, especially at the junction that we find ourselves in right now in humanity's journey. Ironically, I think a big part of how our disrespect and destruction of nature has been justified and explained over the past 200 years is actually through a gross perversion of the words of the godfather of evolution himself, Mr. Charles Darwin. Of course, we haven't really given him much of a shout-out yet, and I'm talking, of course, about the famous line that everyone can quote: "survival of the fittest". But unfortunately—correct me if I'm wrong—he never said that, "survival of the fittest"?
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, so it's a phrase that we all just assume Darwin wrote, because it's so tied up in what most of us think of as Darwin's message: evolution, survival of the fittest. But it wasn't; it was a contemporary of his called Herbert Spencer, who went on to develop some very, frankly, nasty social Darwinian ideas about human society, about how humans should live. It was very cutthroat, based on competition, and he had this phrase "survival of the fittest", and he persuaded Darwin to put it into a later edition of On the Origin of Species. And Darwin did. So what that has helped do—and it wasn't just that—is that Darwin's message about how evolution works has been basically biased towards, tilted towards competition being the absolute key to how life evolves and operates in this cutthroat, competitive way. But actually, it's really not just that. There is that, but it's also super reliant on cooperation and symbiosis. Some of that is in Darwin's work, but it's just overshadowed massively by the idea of competition. And there's lots of reasons for that. I mean, I think the most obvious reason is that at the time, it was the height of the Industrial Revolution, it was the height of the British Empire; people wanted to believe that nature worked the same way that rampant capitalism worked, right?
James Kennedy: So they thought, "Oh, great, here's some scientific support for capitalism to justify it, right?"
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, so it was kind of twisted. Darwin knew this as well, but I think it kind of went too far out of his hands, really. And now we're in this position where, for many years, people have thought that there is this justification for a capitalist way of life because that's what we see in nature, but we don't see that in nature. And one thing that really surprised me as well was Tennyson's poem In Memoriam that has this famous phrase in it: "nature, red in tooth and claw". I always thought that image of nature—of bloody fighting, you know, lions fighting with blood and red in tooth and claw—I always thought Tennyson had written that after reading Darwin and understanding, "Okay, this is how the world works." Because Darwin and Tennyson were exact contemporaries, born in the same year, and Tennyson did read Darwin, but he wrote those words I think 15 years before Darwin published his book. So Tennyson, when he said "nature, red in tooth and claw", was describing the way people already thought the world was. Darwin was adding to that, and then people took that as more scientific support, as you say, for how they wanted the world to work, right? But as we've been saying, that is not the way the world works, or not only the way the world works.
James Kennedy: Yeah, no, it's disappointing, man. Still to this day, you know, I hear people say, if we're talking about the economy or social inequality or something, people are like, "Well, the thing is, mate, you know, it's science, mate, you know, it's dog eat dog, science, bro. You can't do anything to change that." And it's like, no, dude, it really isn't.
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, that way of thinking has been used to justify terrible things. And it's really not the way the world works. So this is another really important thing that I'm trying to do with this book: to correct that misapprehension and that terrible, wrong way of thinking, and show, "Well, this is not how it's working in nature, and look at all this—these are the reasons why."
James Kennedy: Well, Togetherness is such a great way of encapsulating that whole concept. And I feel like Darwin might have been victim there to the need for a snappy title himself, you know, like "survival of the fittest"—it's snappy, memorable, it sounds good. And I feel like also Richard Dawkins with The Selfish Gene had a similar problem. I mean, "selfish"—such a great title, classic, iconic book. But in reading that, I do remember him actually stating at one point in the book that genes require the survival of the broader ecosystem within which they live. Vested interest—call it selfish if you want, but they have a vested interest in the survival of the whole. I remember there's a passage where he actually says that in the book. Yet when people talk about The Selfish Gene, again, it always comes with that kind of tone of, "Well, you know, it's genetic, mate, it's selfish by nature."
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, people don't really read the book, they just read the title, and then they think, "Oh, well, some people are born selfish, just got to get on with it." But it's really not what it means. It's really interesting—I was actually talking to Richard Dawkins a few weeks ago about this, about the title of his book. Because it wouldn't have done so well if it was called something else, if it was called The Immortal Gene or The Socialist Gene. Well, he did consider The Cooperative Gene, right? Which is what you're saying: genes have to cooperate in order to get to the next generation. They also do have to be—or you can think about how they behave—selfishly. But at the time he wrote it in 1976, he really wanted to get away from the idea that many people had then: that evolution worked for the good of the species. And so he needed to wrench that idea away from people and say, "Well, no, evolution works at a lower level to that, and we need to think from the genetic point of view, from the gene's eye view," right? And that's why he went with The Selfish Gene, because it really forces you to think from the gene's eye view. But as we've been saying, it does mean people take what they think it might mean without reading the book. So it's been a really strong point and a really bad point about that book—the title is both brilliant and not so good at the same time.
James Kennedy: That's fascinating that you actually had that conversation with him recently.
Rowan Hooper: Yeah, well, because it's the 50th anniversary of The Selfish Gene, so he's republished the book and I did an interview with him about that.
James Kennedy: Wow, what a privilege that was, man. Right, well, we have got to bring human beings to the center of the conversation, which is where we always like to be as a species. Speaking of this disconnect from nature that we have justified for so long, is it accurate to say that this is a mentality that began in the Agricultural Revolution—this idea that the rest of the natural world is just there to be mined, looted, and stripped of all of its bounty without much regard for the broader need for balance that holds the whole thing together? Is this something that began with the Agricultural Revolution and has got progressively worse since then, or were things already moving in that direction before then?
Rowan Hooper: That's a great question. I don't know if I want to tie it to a single moment where this separation happened, it's just been sort of gradual. You can see it more in our society in Western modern civilization, where we don't really think anymore about where our food comes from and how we get it; it just—we get it from the supermarket, and then we cook it and eat it. But if you look in more traditional societies, they are still much more aware of where their food comes from because they grow it. And in even more traditional ones, they might literally go and gather it rather than grow it in farms in their own sort of plots. But when you're living much more closely to nature, you can't help but be connected to it, because you do know where everything's coming from and what consequences there will be if you went and chopped down your whole orchard one year—you're not going to get anything next year. Or if you take all of the fish, there's no more fish in the pond. So we've been acting like that, and we have been managing to get away with it because there is a lot of bounty. I can't help but use that word, but we see nature as resources for us to use. But if that's unchecked, then it will start to fail. You mentioned the fish—fish numbers have completely crashed. We thought the sea was boundless in the amount of resources we could take from it, but we've taken so much on an industrial scale that it's starting to dwindle, even the amount of food in the sea. And that's just one example. So we've been going over the top in our extraction from nature for many years, and that's led us into this place where many of the ecosystems that support us, that support our planet and our life, are not in a good way—they're teetering towards collapse. So, yeah, we have to rein in that tendency to just think of nature as this boundless resource for us to get, and start thinking about it as, "Well, this is something that is supporting us, that we're relying on, and we have to work with it, not just against it."
James Kennedy: Yeah, well, you've mentioned the C-word a few times, so let's talk about that. I'm talking, of course, about capitalism. It seems to me that capitalism is incompatible with the sort of ethos that you're describing here. This symbiosis that occurs all through nature runs very contrary to the whole ideology of capitalism and the unfortunate way that it has been justified through this misuse of the Darwinian language. I don't want to make this political, but is capitalism going to have to be addressed if we are going to attempt to repair any kind of symbiosis with the rest of the natural world?
Rowan Hooper: Well, I think it is, yeah. I'm not a policy wonk or someone who gets too much into how we recalibrate our politics, but I think from all that we've been saying, the idea of unchecked exploitation of nature doesn't work. So, yeah, I don't think capitalism can work. Now, how we get rid of it or how we adjust it into something that works better is a whole another book, right? That's something else. So I wish I knew how we could move away from it, because it's one of the biggest challenges we face. That sort of unchecked capitalism has brought us into this terrible place. We haven't really mentioned fossil fuels because that's not really part of the symbiosis story, but it's still part of the exploitation of nature, right? We're using all this fossilized energy from the sun that plants made through symbiosis over millions of years, and then it turned into oil, gas, and coal. We're digging that up, setting it on fire, and it's changed the atmosphere and driven us into this terrible place. So how we get away from that is the question of our time, right? It's the most important question we face. So I don't know, but I'm just trying to help in any way I can to start nudging us into this direction away from capitalist exploitation of the world and into a better place where we understand symbiosis and cooperation with nature, and we understand that we're part of nature and that we can't just exploit it and destroy it for our own will in an unchecked way.
James Kennedy: Beautiful, man, I totally agree. Unfortunately, I think it might be a situation where change is going to be thrust upon us whether we like it or not, you know? I mean, we're in a situation now whereby you meddle with nature too much and it's going to bite you on the ass, and that's what we're seeing right now. I'm a bit of a cynic, though—I don't see progress going in the right direction at the moment, I see it going in the opposite direction. Where do you sit on this? Are you more hopeful than myself?
Rowan Hooper: Look, I'm like you as well; I'm not very hopeful about how we're going to turn this around. You see Elon Musk has become a trillionaire and then lost money again, so he's not quite a trillionaire, but he's too bloody rich, for sure. And as you say, the one percent has just been getting richer and richer. So how you turn the ship around—it sometimes looks like we're losing it, like the rich are just getting richer. How are we going to get this ship turned around? It does seem to be a hopeless task, but there are still more of us than there are of them, even though they're rich, right? And I feel like you just have to keep on pushing and keep on working towards a better world, even if you feel like it's hopeless and we're outgunned. You've just got to keep on doing it. Some inspiration I always take is from the woman who got the Paris climate deal over the line in 2015, Christiana Figueres. She was the head of the international climate change group, and it was basically her will that got that Paris agreement over the line and the commitment to trying to reduce global warming to keep it under two degrees. You can argue whether that's worked or not—it has worked a bit—but anyway, what she calls her way of thinking is "gritty optimism", right? So she just forces herself to be optimistic. You might not feel optimistic, but you've just got to do it, because what else are you going to do? I just think that's a great way of thinking about it. Sometimes we just don't feel optimistic about the world; we're not all going to wake up and go, "Yeah, everything's great!" But you've just got to grit your teeth and get on with it in a grittily optimistic way. I do like her way of thinking about that, and I often use that myself when I'm not feeling the best about the world: you've still got to get on with it.
James Kennedy: Love it, love it! And what a great message to get us towards the end of the podcast. It does segue from your last point, and it's basically: what does a state of togetherness look like for humanity together with the rest of nature?
Rowan Hooper: Well, I do think you can imagine a future where there is a much closer understanding of the benefits that we get from nature. I think that there is a growing understanding that being in nature has really positive mental health benefits. But imagine if we didn't have to go on a bus ride to a nature reserve, if our communities started to integrate nature much more closely from where we live. Then we would get those mental health benefits right away, but we'd also get loads of other things. We know that our communities are cooler the more trees there are around. We've all been living through a really horrendous heatwave at the moment; in places where there are lots of trees, that brings the temperature down. So working with and living with nature is going to help us get through climate change, some of which is already locked in. So that's one thing. But also, understanding that the choices we make in our lifestyles—especially what we eat, not just how we do our transport using fossil fuels or heating our homes with fossil fuels, that needs to change too—the things we eat need to change. Understanding that, for example, some of the food we eat has been over-fertilized, but if we think in a symbiotic way, we can grow food with less reliance on synthetic fertilizer, which has all these knock-on effects of damaging our ecosystems and polluting our rivers. We can work with nature and still produce food that's good for us without having such a bad footprint on the rest of the ecosystem. And I think that does involve eating less meat and dairy, which has an outsized bad impact on the planet. People get very touchy when they feel like they're being lectured to about what they can eat and what they can't eat, so that's something we have to do in a very sensitive and educated way. I don't really get into that in the book, but as I was looking forward, that is something that flows from the book: how we need to start thinking about changing our lives so that we live in a more sympathetic, symbiotic way.
James Kennedy: Amen to that, man, beautiful way to end up. Well, Rowan, I've got to let you go because I know you've got a million of these to do, and I really appreciate you taking the time out today. This has been an incredible chat. Thank you so much for the book, a fascinating and timely read which I would encourage everybody to rush out right away and buy. Togetherness is out now, available everywhere. Go grab a copy, grab 10 copies, give them to your friends! Rowan can also be heard on the brilliant New Scientist Podcast and followed on Instagram @rowhoop. I'll put links to the book and links to the socials and everything else in the show notes, please click, click, click! And Rowan, we're going to let you go. Thank you so much for your time.
Rowan Hooper: Thanks, James
Key Points:
Guest Dr. Rowan Hooper discusses his new book "Togetherness," which explores symbiosis as a fundamental force in nature.
Symbiosis is defined as intimate living together between different species, and it is far more prevalent and important than commonly recognized.
Examples of symbiosis include lichen, orchids, mycorrhizal fungal networks, legumes with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, leafcutter ants and fungus, and the human gut microbiome.
Two ancient endosymbiotic events—mitochondria and chloroplasts—were pivotal in the evolution of all complex life and plants.
The phrase "survival of the fittest" was coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin, and has been misused to justify cut-throat capitalism and social Darwinism.
Hooper argues that unchecked capitalism and the exploitation of nature are incompatible with the symbiotic reality of life and must be addressed.
He advocates "gritty optimism" and a future where humanity integrates nature into communities, diets, and lifestyles to restore balance.
Summary:
In this episode of the James Kennedy Podcast, host James Kennedy interviews evolutionary biologist and New Scientist podcast editor Dr. " The conversation centers on symbiosis—the intimate living together of different species—which Hooper argues is far more common and fundamental than most people, including many biologists, realize. He provides striking examples: lichen as a composite of algae and fungi that creates soil, orchids that depend on fungal partners, the vast mycorrhizal networks connecting trees underground, legumes that house nitrogen-fixing bacteria, leafcutter ants that farm fungus, and the human gut microbiome that influences mood and digestion.
Hooper explains that two ancient endosymbiotic events—the incorporation of mitochondria and later chloroplasts—unlocked the evolution of all complex life and plants. The discussion then turns to how Darwin's ideas were distorted by Herbert Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest," which has been used to justify ruthless capitalism and social Darwinism. Hooper argues that unchecked capitalism and the exploitation of nature are incompatible with the symbiotic reality of life and must be addressed.
He remains cautiously hopeful, advocating "gritty optimism" and a future where humanity lives in closer symbiosis with the natural world through community design, sustainable food production, and reduced meat consumption. The episode concludes with a call to read "Togetherness" and support the podcast.
The James Kennedy Podcast is a podcast hosted by musician and author, James Kennedy. Exploring the big questions around health, social issues, politics, mental health, art, the human condition and how to navigate this thing called life through casual conversations with scientists, activists, rock stars, philosophers and academics. Please subscribe, leave a rating and support the show.
