I'm not sure about elsewhere, but there really isn't such a thing as a mycology PHD in the US, which seems very weird but it's just kind of how it is, and it's frustrating given my interests.

If you want a doctorate in mycology, you want to study plant pathology, or microbiology, or soil biology, or some other biology fields where fungi are definitely relevant, but a university can justify the course by saying you'll be a doctor or agriculture scientist.

This leads to a weird thing where mycology is a vague topic not because studying fungi is not a specific thing, but because people who study fungi have to make it just part of their expertise. There are mycology journals, but the writers aren't mycologists, they're X.

It also leads to people like Stamets and yrs truly and other amateurs believing we're experts, or in the former's case, marketing themselves as experts, because there isn't *quite* an authoritative body on fungal biology.

Fungi are these cool and complex organisms that cohabitate with us us and all life on earth, and we just, haven't quite decided on a good, systematic way to understand outside of how they specifically affect us, or our crops, or animals. So we just kind of don't understand them.