There’s a Paul Stamets video where he talks about how mushrooms are so closely related to humans that we both fight off similar pathogens and that is why they are so useful to us for medicine (penicillin for example.)
In the Paul Stamets TED talk, he never says that humans specifically are genetically close to fungi. He said that between all the different kingdoms of life, animals and fungi were more biologically similar than any other two kingdoms.
That definitely explains why we can borrow useful defenses from fungi, like antibiotics, but it’s definitely not a reason to believe that our immune systems would have any difficulties differentiating between certain fungi and our own bodies, at least not for reasons related to direct genetic similarities.
There’s an enormous difference between kingdoms, so being more similar still leaves us very far apart.
I was thinking, “he is a real mycologist,” before I figured out to whom you were referring.
Yeah, I don’t know if @Stamets@lemmy.world is a mycologist but he’s certainly named after one.
