So, about one mushroom species in five is poisonous. Why is the ratio so low, why are there lots of edible ones? Without hard-shelled seeds to spread, why be eaten? And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse". Meanwhile three of the deadliest species seemed to need their toxin (amanitin) so much that they picked it up through <i>horizontal gene transfer.</i> Why did just <i>those</i> ones need to be deadly? In addition to which we have these species that don't even make you sick, just make you trip out, a function which looks to have evolved three times over in different ways. What kind of half-assed evolutionary strategies are these? What do mushrooms <i>want?</i>
It's really fucking suspicious that mushrooms evolved mechanisms to produce serotonin.<p>But it helps when you remember that a mushroom is the <i>fruit</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
BTW, Caffeine is also a naturally occurring insecticide, yet humans tend to repurpose and hack things.
Some argue that THC in cannabis actually works similarly because when herbivores regularly ingest it, they become lethargic and lazy, causing them struggle to survive in the world. Kinda like my roommate.
But cannabis the needs heat to convert, it’s more likely it evolved with Human influence considering the years of overlapping land races tied to our trade routes
I thought it wasn’t generally psychoactive until heated?
your last sentence reminds me of my dorm roommate in college. very standard stoner who was constantly blazing and years later i've never known a lazier dude.
It's even weirder than that. It turns out that at very low concentrations caffeine seems to have similar effects on insect neurology as it does on ours. There are some plant species whose flowers produce caffeinated nectar. Bees seem to like these flowers preferentially, and have an easier time remembering where they are. (Yes, bees get buzzed.)
There are some flowers which produce tiny amounts of caffeine in their nectar, apparently to give the pollinators a buzz.
Love me some Capsaicin, even though I’m not supposed too (I guess)
All spices basically too afaik.
It's not that suspicious- many molecules in nature are made from the same few precursors like cholesterol, amino acids, etc. and on top of that there's pressure for plants/fungi to evolve molecules similar to ones animals use in order to affect them.
The brain is a fiber network like the mycelium, likely the same genes (animals are related to mushrooms) and neurotransmitters are involved in its function.
Two things:<p>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 <i>sought after</i> for other reasons, like capsaicin.<p>1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution doesn't <i>want</i> 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.<p>So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as <i>intelligent</i>. 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?"
While your objection is technically correct it can still be useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not being true in a literal sense.<p>Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.
No.<p>"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 (*).<p>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.<p>(*) 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).
Right. It's <i>extremely</i> unlikely that "unable to synthesize Vitamin C" would ever have actively been selected for. But it was also unlikely to be strongly selected against in any version of humans or their near ancestors which have access to basically any common food.<p>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.
Framed in anthropomorphized terms this would look something like the goal of humans as a species is not the synthesis of vitamin C but rather mere survival. Walking a path where we come to depend on external sources is not necessarily at odds with that.<p>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.<p>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!
You're being overly literal. It's not "trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process" but rather "using anthropomorphization as a descriptive tool". This situation is not unlike when someone takes issue with an analogy due to erroneously interpreting it as a direct comparison.<p>> here are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric<p>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.<p>> evolution is not attempting to optimize anything<p>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.<p>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.
and you are missing my point that trying to help people understand a process that has no design element as if it was one that did actually does them (and the process) a disservice, possibly a great disservice.
I've told people off for using the pathetic fallacy too, in the past, I guess I just said "what do mushrooms want" for the sake of rhetoric. Well, because it would be funny. Fine then, I was trolling.<p>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, <i>stumble into</i> 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.
> how to square the idea that evolution produces knowledge with the idea that it doesn't optimize even for reproductive fitness<p>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).
I laughed!<p>"What do mushrooms want?" Is hilarious given your evolution context!<p>Sometimes, it can make sense to step back and laugh.<p>The number one response to words we do not like is righteous indignation.<p>It is almost always a bad idea too. Funny that!<p>Humor can be powerful as can giving benefit of doubt followed by one or more probing questions.<p>Amazing conversations often follow.
There is no broader context wherein natural selection can be considered to be an optimization process, that is a pernicious misconception of evolutionary theory. Fortunately, people with a computer science background have a distinct advantage towards correcting this fallacy, because their training affords them an understanding of information as a working concept that lay people rarely attain.<p>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.<p>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.<p>With regards to evolution, how could nature <i>select</i> without having an <i>idea</i> of <i>what</i> 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.<p>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).<p>What is the make-up of the natural selection algorithm's implementation? It is the entirety of nature itself, in whole <i>and</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
A more intuitive and natural phrasing, even though it's invalid in a technical sense. I've noticed this happens when people talk about computers/software as well ("it thinks the variable is set", "it freaks out if it doesn't get a response", etc). Outside of formal writing/presentations, using only technical terminology seems to take a suboptimal amount of effort for both speaker and listener compared to anthropomorphizing (unless, as you mention, the listener is a layman who gets the wrong idea).
It’s a useful start to move away from “it’s just random” but it’s just so different it doesn’t help in many cases. It’s not approximately the same.
It definitely is not useful. Your model should at least attempt to approximate reality, not to depart from it by putting effect before the cause. That way lies madness.
> So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as <i>intelligent</i>. 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?"<p>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.<p>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.<p>But the people that don't believe in evolution are so indoctrinated it doesn't matter what words we use.<p>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 :)
If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model.<p>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.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins emphasized that the primary unit of evolution was the individual gene, not whole genomes. The genes were replicators and the genomes were just collections of replicators, and the way the selection pressure math worked out, there was too much diffusion of responsibility for whole genomes that typically evolution could not work coherently at that scale, or at least that's my best recollection of the book's main theory.<p>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.<p>Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point?<p>edit: typo
Survival of the fittest is also a wrong way to think about evolution that leads many people to make assumptions that are backward.<p>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 <i>lot</i> 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.<p>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.
0) What do humans have to do with it? We're not the only animals that eat mushrooms.
that's exactly the point, the _lack of_ humans during its evolution is what it has to do with us, a mushroom may be poisonous to the species that it evolved around, while at the same time not being poisonous to humans
I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.
I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".<p>I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
The constraint is a life-forms' existing form. A given genetic sequence can only move (in general) a small distance from the existing sequence.<p>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 search space <i>is</i> highly constrained. All life on this planet is based on hydrocarbon chemistry, more or less, and must operate in the face of high rates of oxidation and water as pretty much the only available solvent. Even with such constraints, the differences between what has evolved (bacteria to blue whales! viruses to polar bears! algae to orchids!) are staggering.<p>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.
Let's take human DNA as an example. It contains 3.2B GTCA base pairs. This gives rise to 4^3.2B possible combos. It's just not possible to navigate this space blindly. There is not enough atoms in the universe to do that. It is known that there is bias in what mutations are favoured.
Of course there is bias, the bias is provided by the natural environment where the organisms coded by the genome must thrive or die. The bias is applied after the mutation occurs, but the mutations themselves are random, or nearly so. Probably there is some differential rate between the likelihood of each of the four base pairs to mutate into each of the others, but I would guess its nearly parity, because that would probably be close to optimal (though that depends on the details of the genetic coding scheme, ie the triplet code that translates nucleotide triples into amino acid codons).
There are multiple constraints that I can immediately identify. Maximal temperature extremes, barometric pressure, atmospheric/substrate compositions, etc. The bias is inherent to the history of the planet Earth and the gradients present across that time and space. I'd say it's highly constrained.
Only a tiny percentage (around 1%) of the DNA in chromosomes codes for proteins.<p>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).
But is the diversity really that staggering?
I mean most animals including possibly dinosaurs that have ever existed share a lot of internal organs, in the same place. They have eyes, brain (with a lot of the same brain areas, even birds have something like a prefrontal cortex but it's called something different).
They all have legs, torso, head.
I would say there is a lot more commonality than difference. The differences come from slight variations on a basic template that works, and then the body looks different and so on.<p>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.
You're choice of samples is rather skewed towards ones sharing a relatively recent common ancestor. Octopus and Sea Squirts are also animals, and they don't have legs or torsos or, in the later case, heads or eyes. Octopus brains are also rather different from those of vertebrates, and they have 8 mini-brains for more distributed/localized control of each major limb.<p>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.
> some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.<p>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.<p>> Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years<p>It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence.<p>> It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".<p>Mutations introduce randomness but beneficial traits can be selected for artificially, compounding the benefits.
> It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence.<p>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.
Your maths doesn't seem right. You can estimate mutation rates very easily, and you don't end up at crazy numbers. The sequence space explored by evolution is tiny compared to the possibilities and closely interlinked. A simple example is comparing haemoglobin sequences from different animals.
> 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.<p>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?
Look at software fuzzing, particularly the coverage guided mutators (basically a simple “genetic algorithm”.<p>It’s amazing what a few random bit flips combined with a crude measurement can do.<p>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!
Why does it need some kind of boundary? What if it was operating on a limitless trajectory?
That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate.
Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of your genome, but are a result of feedback from the environment (and not random mutations, viability of which natural selection will judge over future generations)
As a general rule of thumb:<p>truth = claim.replace(/I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, "I'm $1.");<p>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.
Is there a way their question could have been phrased that would have not drawn you to make that assumption, which seems to be an ethos attack, or are you predisposed to reply in such a way about any philosophical evolution question?
When people say /I'm not (.*?), but (.*)/, they invariably are what they're claiming they aren't. That's what that phrase means. For example, we've all heard it a million times from people defending their vote for Donald Trump. There's even a wikipedia page about it:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but</a>...<p>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.<p>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".<p>"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.<p>Again, this is a discussion about psychedelic mushrooms, fairytale-like hallucinations, and machine elves, so woo away all you want!<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4</a>
I have little patience for intelligent-design and the likes, if that's what you are getting at.<p>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.
In stark contrast to what you're claiming, I have absolutely zero patience for intelligent design and the likes -- that’s exactly my point.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Your claim that "blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space" flatly contradicts the theory of evolution.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Evolution is blind with respect to foresight, but not blind with respect to feedback, structure, or retention.<p>Mutation bias, developmental constraints, and non-uniform genotype–phenotype mappings are foundational components of modern evolutionary biology, not ad-hoc patches.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Maybe won't be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview).<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ</a>
This is getting downvoted for the same underlying reason I’ve already pointed out elsewhere in the thread: it follows the same red flag "I’m not $1, but $2" pattern, just expressed in a different form.<p>"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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That’s why it’s being downvoted.
1) No one asked why it's being down voted (to... -1, the horror). I'm not here for internet points.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <a href="https://xkcd.com/1053/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1053/</a><p>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."
> $insane_argument_against_evolution<p>That looks like Perl variable syntax. Arguably the most mushroom like programming language.
Also way too biased to humans, the fact that they poison us could just be a biochemistry coincidence, the author is operating from a very human-centric POV (like you say in (0))
> like to think of evolution as intelligent<p>Evolution is more intelligent than people assume.<p>The selection is driven by each species choices, and the more intelligent the species, the more intelligence played a role in it.
The fly agaric, is very poisonous and has a very distinctive red with white dots pattern to warn about its poison. Unfortunately, that pattern looks so pretty that disney and ninetendo decided to use it as their generic mushroom coloring. So, if you are hiking with your kids, and they see a pretty mushroom just like in cartoons, don't let them touch it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
There are plenty of poisonous plants that large animals e.g. farm animals will happily eat and die. Yew, water hemlock etc. are notorious livestock killers.<p>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.
>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.<p>Just wanted to note that these phenomena are important enough in the study of mimicry in biology to have earned their own names:<p>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.<p>Batesian mimicry is when a harmless or palatable species evolves to mimic a harmful, toxic, or otherwise defended species.
Many good answers, but I'll add another angle I don't see any replies covering, which is that being poisonous/toxic is <i>expensive</i>. We humans lead charmed lives by the standards of the biosphere, where we get obese, and even before we got obese, many of us had unbelievable access to nutrients and energy. The steady state of the ecosystem is a war where every calorie must be spent carefully. This is particularly clear in the bacterial world but it progresses up to macroscopic plant life as well. Producing poisons is energy you could be using to grow or reproduce. Some poisons require additional care because they're still poisonous to the producer, it's just that the producer spends additional resources on containing the poison so it doesn't affect them.<p>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.
I've watched a documentary on mushrooms. Their posion is not a defense mechanism in most (all? don't remember) cases. It is just a consequence of the fact that mushrooms need to dump the excess Nitrogen somewhere, and that is related to the fact that most posionous mushrooms are those who thrive in Nitrogen-rich environments, like a leaf forest floor. And unfortunately for us, Nitrogen is a component for many creative biologically active substances.
FWIW, human is the best mushroom's friend, when you cut it and carry around you seed tons of spores, so as a sibling comment said, mushrooms would not need to develop anti-human defenses. It's just that some of them got (un)lucky when played the chemical roulette while trying to figure out how to get rid of Nitrogen waste.
Its the same evolutionary patterns that plants went through.<p>Most mushrooms are edible because their spores can pass through the digestive system of most animals, thus allowing them to spread.<p>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.<p>As proof of this evolutionary arms race, there are fruit flies that have developed resistance to amatoxins.
It may be worth mentioning, for anyone who didn't know this already; that the fruiting body, which is what your normally see, isn't most of the mushroom. The rest of it is in the ground, or in something else like a dead log or live tree. So the organism can afford the fruiting body to be eaten, if it serves the purpose of spreading spores.
This relates to why you will often see multiple mushrooms of the same type blooming at the same time in a ring pattern: the edge of the ring is the periphery of the linearly, radially expanding mat of subterranean fungal fiber weave, which produces fruiting bodies at its edges.
Insects have the some of the same neurotransmitters as mammals, but they can be relaying different things. For example, dopamine is not used for reward learning, but for aversion learning and pain.
Even in humans it has multiple roles, such as for movement (as in Parkinson's disease), and various signals around the body, excreting salt, calming down T-cells.
> Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our brains.<p>True for coffee as well (if you substitute psychedelic with a more appropriate word).
Yep, thats a good one. Caffeine is deadly to insects, but a mostly safe stimulant for us. Nicotine also comes to mind. Plants have developed tons of defense mechanisms that are deadly to one class of animals, but useful or only mildly deterrent to others. Avians are immune to capsaicin, but an irritant for mammals.. except for some hairless primates.
Plants want to be eaten only by big animals that take them on long and random walks and then die far away from where they are picked up to fertilize the seed.
Which also explains the talking Ameglian Major Cow on the menu at Milliways, in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: when you confuse evolutionary outcomes with intent, you end up with livestock enthusiastically volunteering for dinner.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAF35dekiAY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAF35dekiAY</a>
Natural selection cuts both ways.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Human takeover of the biosphere is a recent event too, and humans are still an out-of-distribution threat to <i>a lot</i> 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.<p>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.
> And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse".<p>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.
You're likely referring to the death cap (Amanita phalloides), which is reportedly quite tasty. But there's also a mushroom that's both deadly poisonous and a sought-after, commercially sold delicacy, the only difference being the method of preparation:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyromitra_esculenta" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyromitra_esculenta</a><p>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).
> What do mushrooms want?<p>I think it's a way of mushrooms saying "We don't think of you at all."
That’s also my thought. The seem to be inside some type of evolutionary gray area or dead-end, where mutations in the edibility axis do not seem to matter much for the survival of the specifies. So we end up getting species of all extremes: extremely poisonous, highly valuable for coursing, trippy, non-trippy, mildly poisonous, etc.
Metastatic cancer where our organs and cells grow every direction forever until resources expire is extremely counterproductive and doesn’t matter for the survival of our species because it usually occurs after reproductive age and the reproduction happened. Perpetuating the flawed genes in the next generation.<p>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
"one mushroom species in five is poisonous"? 20% ??? That seems like a crazy high estimate to me, at least if you mean deadly poisonous to humans. In the USA there are only a few species of amanita, galerina, a few of the hundreds of species of cortinarius, maybe some gyromitra and a handful of others I can think of that will kill you. Among the many thousands of mushroom species in the USA, there are only a few dozen known deadly poisonous ones. It's a really tiny percentage. Of course that doesn't mean that the others are <i>edible</i>, just not gonna kill you...
Seems clear to me that poisonous != deadly poisonous by GPs - as they stated, many of the poisonous mushrooms have mild side effects, like “makes a hangover worse.” So 20% is definitely high for deadly poisonous, but not for inedible/mildly poisonous.
Fruit bodies are reproductive organs, spores can survive digestion, and there are plenty of species that use animal waste as a substrate.<p>The same logic of hard seeds applies to spores.
I dig your style, you sound like my inner monologue :D
I think of those "genetic algorithm car thing" simulations that run in a browser.<p>weird stuff survives.<p>and good stuff crashes and burns sometimes.
A mushroom doesn't produce seeds, it produces spores.<p>If you pick a mushroom the spores use you, your clothes, your pets, your horses as vectors for spreading.
Amanita Muscaria seems like it does use colour as a warning signal - it's bright red.
There are other bright red mushrooms (especially russulas) which are quite tasty. Russulas also can have many other bright colors. Conversely, many of the deadliest mushrooms where I live are plain and unassuming, at least in the color spectrum I can see.
Not exactly. You can eat that mushroom but you'll have indigestion problems. Squirrels around me love it though. You can also parboil it and you'll be fine, which it is actually quite tasty.<p>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.<p>The death cap is white or yellow, looking quite mundane. Especially compared to Muscaria.
I appreciate your thirst for knowledge
They want the same thing as every other organism wants - maximal exploitation of a niche by a lineage. Each adaptation that survives overwhelmingly tends toward advantage in the exploitation of a niche - fending off predation, establishing control over resources, symbiotic support, parasitic drain, and a myriad other capabilities that are highly environment dependent.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Some are <i>saying</i>: "Don't come anywhere near me". Others are are <i>saying</i>: "Take a little, I'll show you a good time. Take too much... I will make you end your own life."