This TED Talk features evolutionary biologist Toby Kierz, recorded live at TED at BCG 2019.

So I stand before you as an evolutionary biologist, a professor of evolutionary biology, which sounds like a rather fancy title, if I may say so myself.

And I'm going to talk about two topics that aren't normally talked about together.

And that's market economies and fungi. Or is it fungi? Or as we say in Europe now,

fungi? You know, there's still no consensus on how to say this word.

So I want you to imagine a market economy

that's 400 million years old,

one that's so ubiquitous

that it operates in almost every ecosystem of the world,

so huge that it can connect millions of traders simultaneously,

and so persistent that it survived mass extinctions.

It's here, right now, under our feet, you just can't see it.

And unlike human economies that rely on cognition to make decisions,

traders in this market, they beg, borrow, steal, cheat,

all in the absence of thought.

So hidden from our eyes, plant roots are colonized by a fungus called arbuscular

micro isi. Now, the fungus forms these complex networks underground of fine filaments,

thinner than even threads of cotton. So follow one of these fungi, and it connects multiple

plants simultaneously. You can think of it as an underground subway system,

where each route is a station

where resources are loaded and unloaded.

And it's also very dense.

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