Posted by astronads 21 hours ago
But it helps when you remember that a mushroom is the fruit of a (usually) much larger organism. Then you can start applying normal fruit rules. Some want to be eaten, or picked up and moved around. Some want to keep insects from infesting the fruit. Others don't give a damn and release spores into the wind or water.
Also remember that nicotine is an insecticide. Insects that nibble on tobacco die, which prevents infestation at scale. (Un?)fortunately it's also neuroactive in apes, so we farm incredible quantities of tobacco to extract its poisons.
There is no logic in evolution at large scales. Things happen, sometimes there's fourth order effects like some oddball internal hormone causing wild hallucinations in apes. It's all random optimization for small scale problems that ripple out to unintended large scale consequences.
I have a hypothesis that taking cannabis (and especially CBD) out of our food chain may be contributing to the increase¹ in prevalence of chronic pain.
¹ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12588185/?utm_sourc...
Both are not bioactive by default in their natural form.
???
Apparently in very early evolution animals and fungi shared a common ancestor. That's a pretty far cry from "related to" as its generally used.
At some point when aliens are confirmed and if they were carbon based you might have people say earth species and alien species are “related”.
0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or even be sought after for other reasons, like capsaicin.
1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution doesn't want anything more than 1 and 1 want to be 2. It's just a process, and sometimes (hell maybe even often) it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Lots of "X steps back, Y steps forward", and oftentimes each of those steps can take anything from decades to centuries or more to make, and by the time it happens what was pressuring that change is gone.
So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"
Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.
"Optimization pressure" makes it sound as if there is a single metric for optimization, whereas there are a constantly shifting set of different metrics. Worse (or more precisely, more complex) there are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric, and evolution doesn't care. Put a little differently, there is no "optimization" pressure at all: evolution is not attempting to optimize anything (*).
Trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process that is absolutely the opposite of that in every way (no intent, multiple outcomes, no optimization) just leads people to not think clearly about this sort of thing.
(*) no, not even "reproductive fitness" - rates of reproduction are subject to massive amounts of environmental "noise", to the degree that minor improvements in offspring survivability will often be invisible over anything other than the very long term. Further, the most desirable rates of reproduction will also vary over time, leading to what once may have appeared to be an improvement into a liability (and vice versa, of course).
So, randomly this pathway is deleted in our species, but there won't be a satisfying "just so" explanation, it's just blind luck. I happen to think we should fix it, most people either don't care or believe we shouldn't.
Or more generally: Why did I do that specific thing? No particular reason, it just happened to work. After all, I managed not to fall off the platform for another few seconds. No telling what the future will bring.
As long as we're thinking about anthropomorphization it's amusing to note that vitamin C synthesis can be framed as a species level tragedy of the commons. In that case you are simply advocating that we as a species make the responsible choice not to participate in a race to the bottom!
> here are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric
So too are there multiple different options when working towards any nontrivial goal in the real world. In the context of stochastic optimization the multi-armed bandit problem is a rather well known concept.
> evolution is not attempting to optimize anything
For the purpose of communication (of some other idea) it could be reasonable to say that the human race merely wants survival first and foremost. That is what evolution is after, at least in a sense. Of course that is not technically correct. Pointing out technical inconsistencies isn't going to convince me that I'm in the wrong here because I've already explicitly acknowledged their presence and explained why as far as I'm concerned objecting to them is simply missing the point.
Switching to a technical angle, to claim that evolution is not optimizing is to claim that water doesn't flow downhill but rather molecules just happen to vibrate and move around at random. It's completely ignoring the broader context. Evolution happens at a species level. It's an abstract concept inherently tied to other abstract concepts such as optimization and survival.
Thanks to your discussion though, I'm now wondering how to square the idea that evolution produces knowledge with the idea that it doesn't optimize even for reproductive fitness. I think you're technically incorrect there: it's that it doesn't optimize exclusively in the short term or by any one obvious strategy. The bottom line is that what survives survives, though, you can't argue with a tautology. Even if what survives is a sloth or a sleeper shark or a bristlecone or (imagine) a single infertile but incredibly tough organism, it still had to find a way (alright, stumble into a way). Maybe your objection is just that "optimize for" implies intent, but intentless-purism in language for biologists is as hard as pastless-purism in language for time travellers.
Its really fairly simply: natural selection requires two things: heritable genetics and a source of variation in the genetics between individuals. Mutation is the most basic source of variation, and that produces new information. But new information isn't necessarily knowledge. Assuming a scientific testing gloss, each new genetic code variation X can be considered as a hypothesis, that "variant X is fit", and then natural selection events that act on copies of X (for or against) serve as experiments testing the hypothesis. Through iterative experiments, we weed out the copies of the variants where the hypothesis of them being fit was proved by natural selection to be false, and what remains should be those copies of genetic variants which have (mostly) proven to be true. Learning and understanding which variants are fit (where the hypotheses are true) is knowledge, and in this way evolution produces knowledge while not having any optimization goal (in the intent sense, which I agree is a requirement for something to be meaningfully "optimizing" anything, because you can't aim in a direction without a sense for that direction).
"What do mushrooms want?" Is hilarious given your evolution context!
Sometimes, it can make sense to step back and laugh.
The number one response to words we do not like is righteous indignation.
It is almost always a bad idea too. Funny that!
Humor can be powerful as can giving benefit of doubt followed by one or more probing questions.
Amazing conversations often follow.
The key insight is that any algorithm implementation for a process which has an objective must, as an absolute minimal requirement, possess an encoding of that objective in its implementation. That is, a real representation of the goal must be in the process's make-up so that the goal can be pursued at all, because correct navigation requires assessing actions for whether they work towards the goal or not, and any such assessment requires meaningful reference to the goal. Without such a definition to refer to, differentiation between desirable and undesirable outcomes is impossible.
This goal encoding may be explicit (ie readily understandable by observers studying the implementation) or implicit (hard to parse), but either way, it must be instantiated in the make-up of the implementation, in some medium with the capacity to hold the goal definition, ie a way of storing the requisite number of bits within the implementation itself (or readily reading it from elsewhere, or constructing it from some combination thereof). This definition of the goal must be implemented in a manner that can be read and acted upon by the rest of the algorithm implementation, so that the system as a whole can pursue states that better match the goal. ie so that it can optimize.
With regards to evolution, how could nature select without having an idea of what it was selecting for? A reference definition of fitness must be available to nature if it is to measure each individual organism's fitness and select accordingly.
For a natural-selection-as-optimization-process algorithm implementation, there would need to be a component that encodes natural selection's optimization objective into the implementation's very make-up (or a ready way to read that goal from an external source).
What is the make-up of the natural selection algorithm's implementation? It is the entirety of nature itself, in whole and in part. Nature is literally everything in the universe, and literally anything in the universe, from the most massive galaxy to the smallest particle, can participate in natural selection events. And no part of nature, save for some animal brains, seems to contain a representation of a goal for natural selection.
Is it even conceivable that everything in the universe, down to the smallest particle, could encode a common goal? Does a volcano encode the goal of maximizing reproductive fitness for the populations living around it? Can a shower of cosmic rays encode the goal of making sure the creatures who's DNA it disrupts are the ones who should be removed from the populace? They don't appear to encode any such evolutionary goals, nor do they have the capacity to maintain any goal at all beyond following the physical laws of matter -- Volcanos are disordered piles of rock and churning lava, and cosmic rays are singular fundamental particles that are subject to wholesale transformation with every impact -- neither has any way of encoding a common objective for natural selection, nor is there evidence for them being able to collectively maintain one.
We can illustrate the paradox of an optimizing nature using your water molecule analogy. A collection of water molecules acting under a gravitational field will demonstrate downwards fluid dynamics which single molecules in space would not, but no matter how much H2O you put together, it will never spontaneously develop any concept of evolutionary fitness.
And yet a flash flood is a very real natural selection event that can reshape the genepool of a coastal town, but all the same it has no means of representing any goal of optimizing the population's fitness through who it drowns and who it spares; its just water. Flowing water performs natural selection, but it isn't optimizing for any goal, no matter how you try to spin it, because it has no way of maintaining a representation of a goal in its disordered and inconstant structure. It flows, yes, but it has no goal in doing so, its not pursuing any optimization objective, all the while it is a real instance of natural selection. It doesn't have or need any way of determining who is more or less fit than another, so how could it be optimizing for it? It's just flooding.
Whether its by deluge, an erupting volcano, a congenital heart attack, or a pack of rabid dogs, the processes making up natural selection events do not possess an encoding of a goal for natural selection. They do not possess the necessary information structure required to pursue a common optimization objective, and so they cannot be optimization processes in any meaningful sense.
No idea why you think the effect is being put before the cause. I'm hungry so I head to the kitchen. An observer says "he wants to eat". Antibiotics are administered. Only the bacterial cells expressing a certain set of proteins survive. An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant".
I can confidently claim that literally nobody says this because a google search for this exact phrase has only one result, and its this thread.[0]
Really though, I have never met a biologist who thought this way. All of the ones I've met and worked with knew that development of antibiotic resistance is not in any way like a decision process, and they usually understood on an intuitive level that bacterial cultures don't have a goal of developing the capability. Its just something that evolves, which is a distinct category of process.
Talking about it the other anthropomorphic way, like you claim is normal and acceptable, just confuses things; it is the opposite of helpful analogy. Infections don't "want" anything, they are better understood using the details of their actual biomolecular mechanics, which are about as far different from how brains work as could be imagined.
[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+infection+wants+to+be...
That's complete bs. Infections don't want anything. You're stuck in a loop of your own making, the only way out is to backtrack, not to keep on digging.
These lines of thinking were discredited many years ago and since then the field has seen enormous progress, anthropomorphize all you want but reality does not care.
Tbh those kinds of people are beyond convincing. And I think most of them are trolling or have fallen under the spell of other trolls. There's clearly a network effect. We don't really have a flat earther movement here in Europe and evolution deniers are insignificant.
I don't think people saying these things actually think evolution is intelligent. They just use the phrase "want" to indicate the survival pressure that lead to the change propagating.
But the people that don't believe in evolution are so indoctrinated it doesn't matter what words we use.
Ps I do find it fascinating that a non intelligent process like evolution managed to create intelligence. Even though the state of the world often makes me doubt intelligence exists :)
He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.
Regarding intentionality being a good practical assumption, I actually don't recall Dawkins recommending that, and it seems doubtful because that can lead to all kinds of fallacious reasoning. I mostly considered Dawkins a data-based neo-darwininian, so it would surprise me that he would recommend that.
Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point?
edit: typo
Yes, the second word of the title.
From wikipedia: 'In the foreword to the book's 30th-anniversary edition, Dawkins said he "can readily see that [the book's title] might give an inadequate impression of its contents" and in retrospect wishes he had taken Tom Maschler's advice and titled it The Immortal Gene.[2] He laments that “Too many people read it by title only.”' [0]
Furthermore, your concept that genes should be thought of as having a plan is just in stark contradiction with the Darwinian conception of natural selection, which Dawkins was largely a champion of.
My own recollection was that he described how genes readily had the appearance of acting in their own best interest, but he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance. Evolution does not have any sense for the future, there is no planning evolved, and Dawkins understands that.
Sorry, I remember differently. That "modelling them as having intention is a useful contrivance" is exactly the central argument of the book.
People misread the title by assuming that he was arguing that they actually did have intention.
Selection doesn’t pick winners, it picks losers. But bad luck also picks losers, and good luck pick winners, so things with small negative or positive effects can be swamped, and anything neutral has no pressure to be phased out at all. So if being born with blue hair turns out not to have any effect on your survival, because for instance none of your predators can see blue any better than they can see what every color your mate is, then there will continue to be blue babies at some rate. And if you or your mate have other genes that do boost your survivability, then there will be a lot of blue babies. But not on the merits of being blue. However the animals involved may just decide to involve blueness in their mate selection criteria. Because correlation.
Then many generations later, if your habitat changes, or your range expands, maybe blue fur protects more or less well against UV light, or moss growing in your fur, or some new predator. Now the selection works more like people think it works. But it’s been sitting there as genetic noise for perhaps centuries or eons, waiting for a complementary gene or environmental change to create a forcing function.
I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
Since you're already starting with a successful sequence, the odds are that a small variant on that sequence is also going to be only marginally more or less successful than the original sequence.
The fact that you find something hard to believe doesn't say much at all. Humans have all kinds of things that we find hard to believe - for example, I find it almost impossible to believe that there is only one object I can see in the night sky with my own eyes that is outside of our galaxy - but that doesn't make them any more or less true.
And yes, certain mutations are favored precisely because of the chemistry constraints (an extremely basic one is which base pair changes actually alter the resulting protein; a more sophisticated one is which amino acid changes alter the physical functionality of the protein).
I'm not sure how to think about the diversity that evolution creates and how diverse it actually is. I would say there are _a lot_ of repeating patterns all across history, with variations on those repeating patterns always changing.
That said, I agree with you that there is a lot of commonality in life. Even in the case of Octopus we share a lot of DNA. I just mostly think that is due to common ancestor and common environmental pressures, not to some fundamental limit in the breadth of evolutionary potential itself. Its probably worthwhile to wonder at how that actually works though. Maybe evolutionary potential could be improved.
Your perspective has the unfortunate bias of being posed at the end of a long stream of evolution that happened to emerge with an intelligence far superior from other living things.
> Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years
It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence.
> It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".
Mutations introduce randomness but beneficial traits can be selected for artificially, compounding the benefits.
My argument doesn't depend on the existence of an intelligent species on the planet. The problem already arises when there are multiple species on ONE planet. If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe. This is why mutation bias exists: not all mutations are equally likely, evolution favours some kinds over others.
Can you expand on this? I'm not seeing why it is implausible for one genome to mutate into another, that seems like it could be accomplished in reasonable time with a small, finite number of mutations performed sequentially or in parallel. After all the largest genome is only about 160 billion base pairs, and the average is much smaller (humans are 3 billion base pairs). So what's the difficulty in imagining one mutating into another?
It’s amazing what a few random bit flips combined with a crude measurement can do.
To me, evolution at first seem implausible. Monkeys banging on a typewriter aren’t going to write Shakespeare. But add a crude feedback loop to them, and soon they’ll be dishing out Charles Dickens too!
truth = claim.replace(/I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, "I'm $1.");
Then again this is a discussion about "Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations" so maybe woo is appropriate, and you should embrace it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but...
If you really mean $2, then just say $2, you don't have to preface it with "I'm not $1, but". That's a waste of words, beating around the bush, a rhetorical shield, that reveals that you really are $1 and you feel the need to be defensive about it.
The word "but" in that context means the thing before it is false, just air escaping from the folds of your fat, and you can ignore everything before the "but".
"But" is a contrastive conjunction, signaling the clause before "but" is expected, socially required, or reputationally protective, and the clause after "but" is the actual communicative payload. It means to discount or ignore $1 and evaluate the speaker by $2. Saying “I’m not $1, but $2” does not strengthen $2, it does't make $2 safer or clearer, it just signals defensiveness, and undermines credibility.
Again, this is a discussion about psychedelic mushrooms, fairytale-like hallucinations, and machine elves, so woo away all you want!
All I'm saying is that blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space. It is already known that mutation bias exists, so what I'm saying shouldn't be that controversial.
All I'm saying is that the whole point of the theory of evolution is that blind enumeration of mutations is not required, and that combinatorial feasibility emerges in spite of the vastness of the search space. It is already well known that mutation bias exists, so none of this is controversial.
Multiple commenters here have already explained this from different angles, including chemical and environmental constraints (PaulDavisThe1st), developmental and functional constraints (Supermancho), and even software analogies like coverage-guided fuzzing and genetic algorithms (BobbyTables2). These are not fringe ideas; they are standard ways of explaining why your "astronomical search space" framing is a strawman.
You are hedging; I am not trying to weasel word or distance myself from evolution, or use red-flag rhetorical "I'm not $1, but $2" devices. I have read, agree with, and acknowledge the other replies to your message, because I understand that evolutionary theory already fully explains the concern you're raising.
Your claim that "blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space" flatly contradicts the theory of evolution.
This has also been directly challenged by other commenters asking you to justify the alleged combinatorial barrier in concrete terms (uplifter), and by others pointing out that genomes do not need to traverse all possible combinations to move between viable states.
The entire point of evolutionary theory is that blind enumeration is not required, and that combinatorial feasibility emerges from selection, heredity, population dynamics, and cumulative retention of partial solutions. No "woo" is required.
Evolution is blind with respect to foresight, but not blind with respect to feedback, structure, or retention.
Mutation bias, developmental constraints, and non-uniform genotype–phenotype mappings are foundational components of modern evolutionary biology, not ad-hoc patches.
People who doubt evolution tend to rephrase it into a strawman -- "random bit flips over an astronomical search space" -- and then declare that strawman implausible.
Several replies here explicitly reject your framing. For example, thrw045 points out the massive reuse of structural templates across species, and PaulDavisThe1st notes that only a small fraction of DNA even codes for proteins, further undermining the idea of a uniform, unconstrained search.
Your "I'm not pushing intelligent design, but evolution seems combinatorially infeasible" move closely mirrors the Discovery Institute / "teach the controversy" pattern: disclaim ID, then introduce a doubt-claim based on a strawman of evolution as uniform random search, then retreat to "just asking questions." That strategy is explicitly, insincerely, and unintelligently designed to manufacture doubt about evolution while insisting it is not religious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute
We can see the sealioning pattern play out here in real time: repeated insistence that ID is rejected, followed by reiteration of the same mischaracterized impossibility claim, even after multiple substantive explanations have already been given.
I’m not hedging like you are here: evolutionary theory does not claim "blind enumeration over an astronomical space," and treating it that way is simply a misstatement of the theory.
I think I and other people recognize your rhetorical patterns and misunderstandings, even if you don't, thus the downvotes. Other commenters have fully addressed your doubts about evolution. To me, the big give-away was your "I'm not $1, but $2" wording.
In any case, this is a thread about psychedelic mushrooms and hallucinations, so if some machine elves want to weigh in with some woo about population genetics, I suppose that’s fair game.
Basically, the "junk" DNA we have may be "variables" that influence form and morphology, thus giving natural selection a vastly reduced design space to search for viable mutations. E.g. not much chemical difference between a bat wing and another mammals hands - mostly a difference of morphology. Allowing for more efficient search of evolutionary parameters instead of pure random walk.
"Maybe won’t be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but..." is a rhetorical hedge that serves the same function: preempt criticism, then introduce a claim framed as rescuing evolution from an implied flaw. That’s social weasel-wording, not epistemic caution, and HN reliably downvotes it.
On top of that, citing an uncritical Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan is about as many red flags as you can stack in one sentence. As you must know but don't state, both are infamous for repackaging long-settled evolutionary biology as contrarian insight, often using the same "search space", "random walk", and "junk DNA" language that shows up in intelligent-design adjacent arguments.
Nothing described here is new or controversial. Regulatory DNA, morphological variation on shared templates, and highly constrained evolutionary pathways have been mainstream biology for decades. Presenting them via a podcast anecdote, framed as a fix for "pure random walk", just reintroduces the same strawman of evolution that people have already corrected multiple times in this thread.
And recommending a Joe Rogan interview with somebody like Bret Weinstein, after admitting you know it won’t be viewed favorably (for very good but unstated reasons), is a disrespectful waste of people’s time.
That’s why it’s being downvoted.
2) This isn't my field - I am not making any claims, merely relaying what I thought was an interesting concept/mechanism I hadn't heard of before, that I thought other curious individuals here might also think was interesting. Isn't that the entire point of HN? I would have very much appreciated links or something to Google over this bizarre analysis of why my comment is downvoted. I didn't know this wasn't novel and was accepted science.
3) I understand Bret/Joe aren't looked upon favorably by certain crowds, particularly on this forum. I tried to get ahead of the "but didn't you know they can't be trusted!" comments and attempt to focus on the substance. If the substance is wrong, great! Let's talk about that.
4) You are assuming malice where there is none, and calling me disrespectful and insisting I must know things. I find that quite disrespectful and uncalled for. Not everyone has your opinions or knows what you know. 10k a day and all that https://xkcd.com/1053/
HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
That looks like Perl variable syntax. Arguably the most mushroom like programming language.
Evolution is more intelligent than people assume.
The selection is driven by each species choices, and the more intelligent the species, the more intelligence played a role in it.
If there are enough poisonous mushrooms, it is possible that most animals decide to leave mushrooms alone regardless of distinctive coloring. That seems to be the case because mushrooms tend not to be bitten by large animals, at least when i go mushrooming. If that happens, it is possible that other mushrooms do not develop poison but rather freeload on the poison of other mushrooms.
Thus, one may guess, that first distinctive poisonous mushrooms like the fly agaric developed, then most animals large enough to eat them developed an instinct to avoid all mushrooms, and then the non-poisonous freeloading mushrooms developed.
There are some psychedelic mushrooms in the amazon that use their psychedelic effect to zombify ants and force them to spread the mushrooms spores. That is really disturbing, find a youtube video of it if you feel like having some nightmares.
Furthermore it should be noted that the poison or the psychedelic effect may not even be relevant for evolution. The poisonous or psychedelic compound may be produced for completely different purpose or as a byproduct of the production of another useful compound.
According to a farmer friend of mine, sheep are also absolutely crazy about hedgehog mushrooms (hydnum repandum), which is not poisonous, but it suggests that they don't shun mushrooms.
Just wanted to note that these phenomena are important enough in the study of mimicry in biology to have earned their own names:
Müllerian mimicry is when two species who are similarly well defended (foul tasting, toxic or otherwise noxious to eat) converge in appearance to mimic each other's honest warning signals.
Batesian mimicry is when a harmless or palatable species evolves to mimic a harmful, toxic, or otherwise defended species.
There is a constant, low-level evolutionary impetus to stop spending any calorie that doesn't need to be spent, which would generally include the production of poisons of any kind. This low-level impetus is clearly something that can be overcome in many situations, but it is nevertheless always there, always the "temptation" to stop spending so much on poisons and redirect it to growth or reproduction. Over time it's a winning play quite often.
Most mushrooms are edible because their spores can pass through the digestive system of most animals, thus allowing them to spread.
Other mushrooms developed toxins to protect their fruiting bodies - often the biggest threat isn't larger animals, but insects. Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our brains. Other toxin mechanisms happen to be deadly to both insects and humans.
As proof of this evolutionary arms race, there are fruit flies that have developed resistance to amatoxins.
True for coffee as well (if you substitute psychedelic with a more appropriate word).
Sure, many things evolved to be less edible. But humans themselves are hunter-gatherer omnivores - who evolved to be very good at eating a lot of very different things. There are adaptations in play on both ends.
There are, in fact, many countermeasures that would deter other animals, but fail to deter humans. In part due to some liver adaptations, in part due to sheer body mass, and in part due to human-specific tricks like using heat to cook food.
If your countermeasures just so happen to get denaturated by being heated to 75C, good luck getting humans with them. It's why a lot of grains or legumes are edible once cooked but inedible raw. The same is true for many "mildly poisonous" mushrooms - they lose their toxicity if cooked properly.
Those countermeasures don't have to be lethal to deter consumption! If something causes pain, diarrhea or indigestion, or some weirder effects, or just can't be spotted or reached easily, that can work well enough. So the evolutionary pressure to always go for highly lethal defenses isn't there. It's just one pathway to take, out of many, and evolution will roll with whatever happens to work best at the moment.
Human takeover of the biosphere is a recent event too, and humans are still an out-of-distribution threat to a lot of things. So you get all of those weird situations - where sometimes, humans just blast through natural defenses without even realizing they're there, and sometimes, the defenses work but don't work very well because they evolved to counter something that's not a human, and sometimes, the defenses don't exist at all because the plant's environment never pressured it to deter consumption by large mammals at all.
And with the level of control humans attained over nature now? The ongoing selection pressure is often shaped less like "how to deter humans" and more like "how to attract humans", because humans will go out of their way to preserve and spread things they happen to like.
Some of the poisonous ones even taste really good, and don't start making you sick for a day or two (and then you die horribly). You hear about it from time to time, where people have the best dinner of their life and then are dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyromitra_esculenta
Although recent research suggests that some poison remains even after careful preparation, and that consumption may even be linked to ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).
I have read stories similar to what I wrote from China as well. I think Europe too, but I would not swear on it.
I think it's a way of mushrooms saying "We don't think of you at all."
Its the same with mushrooms, the difference being that not only do the spores exist in high numbers, a mushroom getting eaten does nothing to the mycelium that spawns the mushroom
The same logic of hard seeds applies to spores.
weird stuff survives.
and good stuff crashes and burns sometimes.
If you pick a mushroom the spores use you, your clothes, your pets, your horses as vectors for spreading.
That mushroom (Amanita muscaria) is also related to the death cap (Amanita phalloides). Though the toxins are different in the death cap and will not be converted/removed by parboiling. Worse than that, you won't show symptoms for over a day.
The death cap is white or yellow, looking quite mundane. Especially compared to Muscaria.
Just look at antelope in north america - they evolved incredible speed and agility in order to outrun and evade megafauna predators, but there's nothing left nearly fast enough to be a threat to them. Environments can change, and leave an organism with features that are no longer necessary or even beneficial in terms of overall quality of life and energy efficiency. The slightest noise can disturb a herd of antelope into bolting as if there were prairie lions or sabertooth tigers on the prowl. They don't need to be hypervigilant in the same way, and it burns a lot of calories to move the way they do, so whitetail deer and other slower species that aren't quite as reactive or fast are better at exploiting the ecosystem as it is.
With mushrooms that have mysterious chemistry, there will be a lot of those sorts of vestigial features. Extinct species of insects and animals and plants will have been the target of specific features, or they might end up in novel environments where other features are particularly suitable, but some become completely counterproductive in practice.
As far as psilocybe mushrooms go, in lower quantities, they actually provide a cognitive advantage sufficient to make a symbiotic relationship plausible between mammals and the mushrooms, albeit indirect. Animals under low levels of psilocybin influence have better spatial perception, can better spot movement in low light conditions, and there's a slight reduction in the neural influence of trauma inspired networks. Large quantities can be beneficial in a number of abstract ways. Any animal that sought those mushrooms out could thereby gain adaptive advantage over competitors that didn't partake.
Having an extremely toxic substance might be useful for killing large organisms and their decomposition either feeding the fungi directly, or feeding the organisms beneficial to the fungi. This can be plants, other fungi, or the feces of scavengers. Horizontal transfer might occur if there's an initial beneficial relationship, animals like the smell and taste of a thing, and then the fungi picks up the killing poison, and the consequences are sufficiently beneficial to outbreed the safe ones.
If too many become deadly, animals get killed off, and the non-deadly ones tend to gain the upper ground, since they aren't spending any resources on producing any poisons. Where there's a balance of intermittent similar but poisonous mushrooms, they take down enough animals to optimize their niche.
There are dozens of such indirect webs of influences and consequences that spread from seemingly simple adaptations, and it's amazing that things seem so balanced and stable as they do. It's a constant arms race of attacks and temptations and strategies.
So perhaps not very recreational as might be assumed given the topic.
For anyone vaguely interested in psychoactive/psychedelic drugs, his books and videos are amazing:
I knew personally someone whose trips usually took 48 hours. Unusually long, yes, and really exhausting.
Admittedly i wanted to try both but back then I didn't have opportunity, and now the mindspace is just not too.... Right for the risks.
Maybe when I'm too old to worry and it's too late to care :)
Also, 12 hours is definitely not short of LSD. I'd say it's the standard duration, with the peak lasting 7 hours. Longer trips can happen, at least to some people, but the default assumption should be about half a day.
Could this mean we're on the brink of discovering an entirely new class of hallucinogens?
> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).
It seems Rubroboletus sinicus, another bolete, is also suspected to have this effect. These hallucinogenic mushrooms are collectively known as "xiao ren ren" in China.
They seem to be relatively well known in parts of China, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea but the ethnomycological work in English is just not really there.
It also seems like it's most likely something in the tryptamine class which could explain the blue bruising. The Wikipedia page has more info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom
> The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong wrote in Baopuzi (The Master Who Embraces Simplicity) around 300 CE that eating a certain wild mushroom raw would result in attainment of transcendence immediately, suggesting that the mushrooms may have been known for thousands of years.
Of course, he also claimed another mushroom would let you live for a millennia without aging, there were 1,000 year old white bats flying around and 10,000 year old horned toads and that eating 200 pounds of jade would make you fly, so... a fair bit of fantasy mixed into his works.
> "No!," she said, most emphatically, "They are real. I have seen them myself!"
> Miss Oh clearly remembered the hallucinations that began that evening and continued into the next day. The walls moved and shifted in geometrical patterns and strange shapes appeared.
> "I'm sleepy all day," she said in English. "I see them. And I see flies bigger than the actual one, perhaps two times big. I see little insects. Not all the time, but when the water splashed out." She apparently became fascinated by the dripping kitchen faucet, for each drop would, upon hitting the sink, sprout wings and legs and crawl away. And she remembered, very clearly, staring intently at the bows of her shoelaces until they turned into butterflies and fluttered off.
The paper devotes quite a bit of text to explaining that the mushrooms bearing this quality have no specific name, and in fact are not distinguished from non-hallucinogenic mushrooms at all. They are referred to by their property of turning blue when handled, which is a property not exclusive to the hallucinogenic ones.
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40390492
Interestingly, despite this prior paper being cited by this press release, and despite the fact that the prior paper devotes almost a page to describing the difficulty of identifying which mushroom(s) might be hallucinogenic given that the people of Yunnan never draw any distinctions between them, this press release assures us that identification of the hallucinogenic species was as simple as asking market vendors in Yunnan whether this was the mushroom that caused hallucinations.
Today's occidental universities would have to pay faux homage to "the poor helpless natives" who were the original custodians of the discovery but were too uncomplicated to do much with it, so with their wonderful generosity these kindly westerners did them the great service of elevating their voices, etc.
You exhibit the same performative grievance-driven identity pattern across your other comments: sweeping "regime and cronies" rhetoric, insinuations without evidence ("what did Obama get in return?"), mocking humanitarian concern as manipulation, and then retreating to grievance when challenged.
That’s not satire; it’s MAGA-adjacent culture-war edgelording.
If you quote racism without clearly rejecting it, you’re responsible for how it lands; if you didn’t want your comment read as endorsing racist tropes, you shouldn’t have put them on the page without explicit rejection. Accountability isn’t censorship, and criticism isn’t violence.
This isn’t uncharitable or violent; it’s grievance rhetoric filling the gap when your argument doesn’t land.
Happy Festivus, Georgie!
did they found the schtroumpf village ?
The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds.
Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do.
It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.
More accurately we can say "an entirely newly described class of chemicals". Even before penicillin was isolated and described for the first time, soldiers would keep moldy pieces of bread and use them on wounds (Penicillium being the most common bread mold). Even Ötzi the iceman was found to be carrying a piece of fungi that we know was used to kill parasitic worms.
While these traditions didn't conceptualize their medicines as compounds or chemicals, they were certainly well aware of their effects. Sometimes intimately so.
All that aside though, there are bolete species documented to have tryptamine content so I would be a little surprised if the active compound(s) in question here aren't also tryptamines. Although I did read that Dennis McKenna hypothesized it could be an anticholinergic effect (i.e. Datura alkaloids)
https://serendipity.li/trypt.html
List:
https://serendipity.li/dmt/dmtart00.html
Yeah, I know, pseudoscience and the like, but biology it's weird and with the current scientific discoveries (and even reusing quantum mechanics for profit, such as chlorofilla with leafs and photons), Nature itself it's 'magical'. Not actually something from fairy tales, but from weird mechanics we are actually grasping a little today.
Instead of my comment from I-Ching being taken as numerology, I would think of the universe as something being 'computed over', kinda like numeric towers under Lisp. Because in the end nothing exists per se; it's just fields generating matter, waves, energy and probably, information. Thus, the Mckenna theory on Fractal Time (and the Chinese paper from Vixra) might be related to hypercubic equations (because of Hamming distance between changes) that we aren't fully aware.
It’s a little bit crazy, I know, but it’s odd to me that evolutionary forces would produce a mushroom that makes you have some specific hallucinations, rather than simply make things swirl together or simply produce intense feelings of euphoria or dread. I mean, marijuana just gets you high and that’s that.
I've been to Yunnan and have eaten that mushroom too (properly cooked!). We can find closely related species to this one in the wild in Japan too, but documentation for those Lanmaoa species found outside China is currently lacking, I believe.
EDIT: Found the field guide I was thinking about on my shelf. It's "中国真菌志 牛肝菌科(III)" [1], which is only about boletes!
[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%9C%9F%E8%...
I wonder what the brain is doing…
The real question is WHY they keep stealing my underwear and left-foot socks?
It could be a subspecies of the "machine elves"...
And spook work for His Jolliness' Secret Service, to keep their Naughty and Nice databases current.
- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.
- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)
- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.
I like that coffee is clearly a drug, a mind-alterer. But it's mostly harmless so it's been boosted as a sort of society-wide mascot. Humans really love drugs.
I can only speak for medically-administered intravenous Ketamine, but I would describe it as like relatively effortlessly floating inside of the non-physical space inside of you and meeting yourself in metaphor, all the while completely aware. The biggest risk seemed to be temporarily becoming a relatively inanimate part of the infrastructure there, and even that was a sort of pleasant and satisfying state.
For example, members of a famous forum recently found, analyzed for alkaloid content, and re-cultivated a strain of Phalaris Aquatica because of its notable alkaloid content. Some other mushrooms became popular this way as well — for example, Psilocybe Natalensis, first found in Natal, Africa. Or the now famous Tamarind Tree British Virgin Islands (TTBVI) Panaeolus Cyanescens that’s widely cultivated at home.
So IMO it's not only scientists, but often enthusiasts who end up gifting these discoveries to everyone else!
It's also not yet known if the active compound can survive dehydration like psilocybin. If not, it would mean even experiencing l. asiatica will be very difficult to impossible for enthusiasts not residing in its native region.