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Comment by voldacar | Hacker News Reader

It's certainly interesting, but what is the explanation for how consuming Psilocybe mushrooms could have effects across generations? Is it that an organism having had that experience might have altered behavior leading to advantages in natural/sexual selection? Or that psilocybin literally alters something physiological or [epi]genetic? Basically how could psilocybin cause a permanent (since it has persisted long after humans stopped frequently consuming psilocybin, assuming that was ever a thing), multigenerational increase in intelligence over a very long period of time?

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I think the theory kind of relies on the notion that there are certain 'inductive leaps' which are hard for the natural mind to make independently, but this knowledge can then be socially transmitted after induction with relative ease. Ex. "Rubbing sticks together a certain way makes fire" is fairly hard to discover with no a priori knowledge, but if demonstrated the meme propagates quickly.

Whether psychedelics are actually effective at producing 'inductive leaps' is something that is under-researched as a result of legal status. There were some very interesting study results around this from the 60s, but more research is needed (many used subjective measures). How can inductive leaps be quantified? Perhaps some sort of expert-peer-grading?

Well the simplest explanation is the classic nature vs. nurture, paired with selective breeding. If you are raised by hippie shroom eating chimp parents, you'll probably be attracted to a different sort of mate than if you are raised in a warrior clan. This sort of taming can happen within 3-4 generations and have permanent effects.

Dmitry Belyayev was able to produce a tame variety of the red fox within 4 generations of breeding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Belyayev_(zoologist)#Be...

He was also able to anti-tame them quite quickly as well.

I have a feeling an alien human researcher would say the same about us if they had witnessed a Walmart on a black Friday.

What takes foxes a number of generations to change, corporations can change in people just by altering incentives. This is the double edged sword of intelligence.

Demonstrating how we can "play god", to some degree, in some circumstances. Kinda makes you wonder if humans might be capable of more than the current state of affairs on this planet.

It's not at all clear to me that humans, ancient or modern, are tamer than other great apes. Chimps in particular are notoriously violent (have you ever seen that picture of a shaved ape? That thing could tear you to shreds!), however other great apes are significantly more pleasant. Also modern humans have an incredible capacity for violence, and there is a lot of archeological evidence to suggest that ancient humans did as well.

I would argue (and I think TM would agree) that the effects on the evolution of human society would be many times more important than any biological changes in individuals.

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