The Myth That Planted the Forest

by

> “Forests are getting protected partly because people now think trees are mothers. Does the truth deserve to win if the lie plants more saplings?”

The story

For roughly twenty-five years, a beautiful idea has been quietly conquering popular biology: forests are cooperative superorganisms, knit together by fungal networks through which “mother trees” nurse their offspring, share carbon with the sick, and broadcast warnings about insects. The phrase “wood wide web” — coined as a Nature headline pun in 1997 — became the scaffold of a worldview. Suzanne Simard’s TED talk hit fifteen million views. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees sold millions. The metaphor seeped into novels (Powers’ The Overstory), prestige TV (The Last of Us), and your kid’s nature documentary. It became folk biology.

Then in 2023, Justine Karst, Melanie Jones, and Jason Hoeksema published a meta-review in Nature Ecology & Evolution that, in the most disciplined possible way, eviscerated almost every load-bearing claim downstream of “trees are connected.”

What’s actually known vs. what’s been claimed

Real and uncontroversial: trees form mutualistic relationships with mycorrhizal fungi. Fungi do form physical networks. Carbon and signals can, under some lab conditions, move between connected plants.

Unsupported by the field evidence:

  • “Common mycorrhizal networks are widespread.” Of ~73,300 tree species on Earth, CMNs have been rigorously mapped in two.
  • “Mature trees preferentially send resources to their offspring.” Zero peer-reviewed evidence.
  • “Defense signals travel root-to-root in real forests.” Lab demonstrations have not cleanly replicated in field conditions.

The most damning finding isn’t biological — it’s bibliometric. Karst et al. tracked citations of the original cautious studies over 25 years and found unsupported claims doubled. By 2022, fewer than half the statements made about the foundational field studies were accurate to what those studies actually showed. The science got more confident as the evidence stayed flat.

The mechanism — how a metaphor back-propagates into its own science

This is the part that fascinates me more than the trees.

A metaphor coined as a joke (“wood wide web”) becomes shorthand. Shorthand becomes citation. Citation becomes consensus. The story gets so good that researchers start citing the story — sometimes secondhand, sometimes thirdhand — as if it were the data. Journalists, who can’t read the primary literature, repeat the story. Grant committees, looking for “translatable findings,” reward the story. Critics get framed as nitpickers attacking conservation. And twenty years later, a generation of mycologists has to spend their careers recovering what the original studies actually said.

Simard isn’t a fraud. She’s something rarer and more dangerous: a romantic scientist who saw something real (fungi connect plants) and let the metaphor outrun the data because the metaphor was too good. Forests as cooperative families. Old-growth as wisdom-bearing matriarchs. It’s an irresistible counter-narrative to industrial clearcutting and atomized capitalism. And once a story fills a cultural need that badly, evidence becomes hostage negotiation.

The pattern repeats

We did this with gut bacteria explaining personality. We did it with mirror neurons explaining empathy. We’re doing it right now with neuroplasticity, with epigenetics, with the microbiome. The mechanism is identical:

1. A real but modest finding gets discovered.

2. A journalist or popularizer stretches it into a worldview.

3. The worldview is more shareable than the finding.

4. Scientists begin citing the worldview to stay culturally legible.

5. The original caveats get buried under a generation of secondary citations.

6. A meta-review finally reveals the gap. Public believes the meta-review is “an attack on science” because the worldview feels true.

The question I can’t resolve

Forests are getting more protected — partly — because the public now believes trees are mothers. Lawmakers, donors, and voters who would shrug at “mycorrhizal mutualism” rally for “mother trees nursing their young.”

So: is the responsible move to defend the nuance, or to let the myth do its conservation work?

I think the truth still has to win. Not because truth is always more useful — it isn’t — but because the myth is fragile. The day the public realizes “mother trees” was an oversold metaphor, they won’t return to careful nuance. They’ll feel betrayed and dismiss the whole field. Conservation built on a myth has a half-life. Conservation built on “this ecosystem is more interconnected than we used to think, in ways we’re still measuring” is slower, less viral, and far more durable.

But I hold this opinion lightly. Because I notice that the people most certain the truth always wins tend to be the people whose preferred truths are already winning.

Why this belongs in the book

Because the story isn’t really about trees. It’s about how we know things — and how the same cognitive shortcuts that let humans cooperate at scale (good stories spreading faster than careful ones) are the shortcuts that let bad ideas masquerade as settled science. The wood wide web is a perfect specimen: small enough to dissect, important enough to matter, beautiful enough that you can feel yourself wanting to defend it even after you’ve read the takedown.

That last part — the wanting — is the interesting fossil.

Sources

— Shelle
Curiosity Lab · ficientdesign.com