Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations | Hacker News Reader

Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations

nhmu.utah.edu

494 pointsastronads320 comments

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 horizontal gene transfer. Why did just those 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 want?

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.

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

Its the same evolutionary patterns that plants went through.

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.

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.

Incorrect.

The inside of a fairy ring dies off as it uses up nutrients.

The leading edge of the circle remains alive so that is why the fruiting bodies (mushrooms) are there. The fungus produces nitrogen which leads to the growth of a greener ring of grass.

The ring’s steady expansion is driven by growth of the underground mycelium (not spores).

> Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our brains.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Two things:

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?"

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))

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".

I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.

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:

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.

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:

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!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4

I have little patience for intelligent-design and the likes, if that's what you are getting at.

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.

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.

great, but we still cannot say anything beyond "what survives, survives". fitness is a central concept to natural selection and ultimately evolution, but it seems to bother nobody that its an empty concept, a tautology. its a nice observation but doesnt actually explain anything, and I expect science to explain the world.

Science helps figure out “how”. If you want it to help you figure out “why” (beyond a probabilistic or mechanical model), you will be disappointed.

> Science helps figure out “how"

im not asking the why, im asking the how

Saying "what survives, survives" may bother Creationists, the Discovery Institute, and Intelligent Design pushers, but not actual scientists who don't have an ideological agenda to discredit evolution as revenge because it discredits their religious dogma.

Saying "what survives, survives" is like saying physics explains motion as "things that move, move." That’s not what the theory actually claims; it’s a caricature.

Evolutionary theory explains mechanisms, not slogans. "Fitness" is not the explanation, it’s a measurable consequence of those mechanisms.

If you want teleology or ultimate purpose, science won’t give you that, so take some shrooms and ask the machine elves. But evolution absolutely explains how structured complexity accumulates without foresight, and it does so with predictive, testable models.

Please inoculate yourself against believing and parroting anti-science Intelligent Design / Creationist talking points by understanding where they come from, and what they led to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Design

Intelligent Design is a religious ideology, not a scientific theory. The Discovery Institute is the evangelical advocacy organization that systematized and promoted it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute

After Intelligent Design failed legally and scientifically, the Institute pivoted to the "Teach the Controversy" strategy -- not to advance new science, but to manufacture doubt about evolution in public education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy

That approach -- revealingly effective -- became a template for later efforts to reintroduce religious ideology into secular institutions. Project 2025 represents the political continuation of that same strategy at a much larger scale: shifting from attacking a single scientific theory to reshaping education, governance, and public policy along explicitly religious lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

These are not isolated phenomena. They are successive adaptations of the same agenda after earlier versions failed.

Exposing Discovery Institute Part 1: Casey Luskin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRxq1Vrf_Js

>Have you heard of the Discovery Institute? Have you fallen under the impression that they know what they are talking about, or can be considered an even remotely legitimate source of information?

>Well, you've come to right place. They aren't. They're a propaganda mill, and all of their content is full of lies.

>They hide behind a paper-thin roster of scientists who have deluded themselves into dishonestly preaching outside of their expertise, and they blatantly misrepresent any scientific research or scientists they are referring to. Constantly. Sometimes they even commit slander.

>That's what this video is about, and it is the first installment in a series where I will expose the fraudulent activity of all the major contributors at the Discovery Institute, one clown at a time.

>Part 1 addresses Casey Luskin, and it is centered around some very serious slander he committed against an esteemed anthropologist.

>But don't worry, I cover lots of other lies and stupidity that come out of his mouth as well.

>If you're a fan of the DI, do please find the courage to watch this rather than running to the comments section to yell at me.

>It's not all that long, and I promise that I make it extremely clear and undeniable that Casey is a liar. If you have a shred of honesty within you, you will quickly see that this is the case. Enjoy!

This dives into the "Junk DNA" cannard:

Exposing Discovery Institute Part 10: Casey Luskin Again (Because He's Such a Loser Fraud)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOnb0SZYZUI

i think intelligent design is bunk.... was this a reflexive contrarian reply without even fully reading what youre arguing against?

I think you are psychoanalyzing me a little bit too much. Am I allowed to say that I'm an atheist and I don't believe in intelligent design, or are you going to explain to me that I'm confused about my own beliefs?

It's exactly because you’re rationally reachable that this matters.

I’m not questioning your beliefs, and I’m not saying you secretly believe in Intelligent Design. The issue is that some of the arguments you’re making didn’t originate organically or scientifically -- they were deliberately promoted through deceptive education policy and textbook standards, especially in large markets like Texas, precisely because that influence scaled nationally. People often absorb them without realizing their origin.

After Intelligent Design spectacularly failed in court, its proponents pivoted to influencing education standards rather than arguing science directly. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), a U.S. federal district court ruled that Intelligent Design is not science and cannot be taught in public school biology classes because it is religious in nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_Schoo...

>[Creationist defense witness] Fuller memorably called for an "affirmative action" program for intelligent design, which did not win much favor with [Judge] Jones in his final decision.

That was one of the most jaw-dropping moments in the entire Dover trial: an unintentional confession that Intelligent Design cannot meet the standards of science and therefore must be smuggled into classrooms under a quota system. "Teach the Controversy" is affirmative action for bad ideas: a grievance policy masquerading as pedagogy.

>"Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions," [Judge] Jones wrote. "The inescapable truth is that both [Alan] Bonsell and [William] Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions. ... Bonsell repeatedly failed to testify in a truthful manner. ... Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony." An editorial in the York Daily Record described their behavior as both ironic and sinful, saying that the "unintelligent designers of this fiasco should not walk away unscathed." Judge Jones recommended to the US Attorney's office that the school board members be investigated for perjury.

So the bald faced liars and $1,000,011 judgement losers pivoted to "Teach the Controversy", and states like Texas were their key targets, because of their centralized textbook approval process and market size, which historically shaped textbooks used nationwide.

The "Teach the Controversy" framing was designed to insert doubt about evolution without explicitly promoting religion, and its language appeared repeatedly in state curriculum debates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy

As a result, many people encountered these arguments against evolution in school without ever being told where they came from or what they were designed to accomplish -- and repeat them without realizing how the same strategy continues today in much broader political efforts, like Project 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design_in_politics...

> some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.

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.

> It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

The search space is 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.

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.

Only a tiny percentage (around 1%) of the DNA in chromosomes codes for proteins.

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).

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.

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).

I don't think this is true at all. There are multiple sources talking about how the mutation rate is context-dependent.

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.

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.

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.

Look at software fuzzing, particularly the coverage guided mutators (basically a simple “genetic algorithm”.

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!

The monkeys in my last experiment got there in 221 years, in particular.

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).

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.

[0] https://youtu.be/WX_te6X-0aQ

Why does it need some kind of boundary? What if it was operating on a limitless trajectory?

The constraint is a life-forms' existing form. A given genetic sequence can only move (in general) a small distance from the existing sequence.

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.

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.

Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.

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.

No.

"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).

Right. It's extremely 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.

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.

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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I laughed!

"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.

> how to square the idea that evolution produces knowledge with the idea that it doesn't optimize even for reproductive fitness

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).

> 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

this is the problem i have with natural selection... it has no predictive power. You can never use natural selection theory to say if an organism is "fit" before it exhibits its fitness. what good is this?

This may be more a problem with how "fit" is defined and used than with natural selection theory itself. Fitness can be hard to define beyond the trivial "these organisms which survived the selection event must be the fit ones," and natural systems are usually so noisy with inputs that its hard to figure out what was actually important in retrospect, or likely to evolve in the future.

Only in situations with a powerful selection pressure (like an asteroid strike causing a nuclear winter, or antibiotic applied to a petri dish) can one have a hope of reliably predicting which variants will be selected for or against.

However, these situations are not irrelevant, especially if we can predict the likelihood of those situations developing. Real predictions of the theory of natural selection can be applied to managing antibiotic resistance in populations of bacteria. For example, we know that antibiotic resistance mechanisms that bacteria evolve will often have an energy metabolism cost to their maintenance. This means that, absent pressure to be resistant to antibiotics, we'd expect a population to gradually lose individuals with the genes for the resistance mechanism, because they would be incurring a metabolic penalty for possessing those genes. So natural selection theory accurately predicts that if you remove the selection pressure of the antibiotic, the bacteria will evolve to lose the resistance mechanism, and become susceptible to the antibiotic again over several generations of natural selection. Using this knowledge, some rural regions will discontinue use of a given class of antibiotics in agriculture to allow for resistant strains to decline, and then resume their use when they are again effective. By intelligently rotating use of antibiotics in this way, we can enjoy their benefits without incurring too much inefficiencies and worse tragedies from antibiotic resistance.

That is real & useful predictive power.

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.

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.

> 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.

I don't agree with this in any way, or perhaps more accurately, I don't agree that we know (and perhaps could know) the scope of the implementation even if this claim was true, which I don't think it is.

The idea that "people with a computer science background have a distinct advantage" is also plainly wrong to me. I have a background (as in, I quit my PhD in) computational biology, have been a software engineer for more than 35 years, and there are just as many people with as without computer science backgrounds who fall for the fallacy.

What part of it don’t you agree with? That an algorithm implementation must encode the goal that it pursues? How can something pursue a goal it has no access to a definition of? If you have an alternative way it could work, please propose it.

I’m not asking rhetorically, I’m truly interested in learning the flaws in my argument for why natural selection cannot be modelled as an optimization process. So if you have the time to reply with a more detailed rebuttal, I’d much appreciate it.

edit: Addendum: I recognize my claim that computer scientists might have an advantage in understanding this is contentious, and I was not implying that they (we) as a group have a better record of understanding evolution’s subtlety than biologists (which I studied in uni) or the average lay person. I just think they could have an advantage in understanding the version of the argument that I gave above, and I am interested in improving it for that purpose.

What is the algorithm implementation when it comes to the physical world? Does the implementation extend to remote galaxies? Is the strong force part of the implementation? We don't know ... there appears to be no way to know.

But even if you could know, it is just demonstrably wrong that the implementation must encode the goal. If you create selection pressure, and have a reproductive system that allows for mutations, then you may end up an "implementation" that encodes the goal implicit in the selection pressure. But anyone who messed around with genetic algorithms or artificial life in the 90s knows that you can trivially start out with no resemblance to "the goal" at all. Where life on earth in aggregate or any specific example of it in particular might be along that pathway is similarly impossible to say.

Finally, even defining "the goal" is tricky. Consider the well-documented case of moth evolution in industrial (and later, post-industrial) northern England. Their camouflaging wing tones changed to respond to the typical color on vertical surfaces, twice within a human generation or three. Was "the goal" flexible coloration across generations, or was it "light, then "dark" and then "light" again? That's a philosophical question as much as anything ...

> What is the algorithm implementation when it comes to the physical world?

It is the physical world, nature is the implementation of the natural selection algorithm. Yes, the strong force is part of the implementation, because the strong force can play a role in selection events, cf nuclear bombs and radiation. The gravitational pull of remote galaxies can also influence selection events by changing planetary orbits minutely.

I don’t see these as problems for my argument because I am not the one claiming they encode an objective, I just see them as natural forces which can influence selection without any overarching purpose or goal. It is those claiming natural selection is an optimization process who must show how it could work. The onus is on them to show where their supposed objective of natural selection is encoded in its implementation.

> If you create selection pressure, and have a reproductive system that allows for mutations, then you may end up an "implementation" that encodes the goal implicit in the selection pressure.

What goal are you referring to?

> But anyone who messed around with genetic algorithms or artificial life in the 90s knows that you can trivially start out with no resemblance to "the goal" at all. Where life on earth in aggregate or any specific example of it in particular might be along that pathway is similarly impossible to say.

I am one of these people, but I don’t know what goal you are saying these systems came to demonstrate. Are you saying these artificial evolution systems had objectives they pursued? What caused them to follow these objectives? What is this “pathway”?

>Consider the well-documented case of moth evolution in industrial (and later, post-industrial) northern England. Their camouflaging wing tones changed to respond to the typical color on vertical surfaces, twice within a human generation or three. Was "the goal" flexible coloration across generations, or was it "light, then "dark" and then "light" again?

There was no goal at any point in the process. Moths with colors that matched their contemporaneous environment were less likely to be eaten by predators than those which stood out. Calling it a goal is a confusion, its trying to add a conceptual framing that isn’t necessary and adds nothing to the understanding of the system. Neither the soot levels in the air nor the birds hunting for moths have a goal of adjusting the balance of moth coloration phenotypes. They are just the context, along with everything else in their environment, in which evolution of moth coloration may occur.

In what sense is there any goal in the example? And if it is a goal, why is it not optimization? I claim there is no goal, no optimization objective to natural selection. Its not just a philosophical side question, it is the question.

edit: typo

> It is the physical world, nature is the implementation of the natural selection algorithm.

But you don't know (and to some degree, cannot know) which parts of it. So you cannot really know if the implementation encodes a goal or not.

> What goal are you referring to?

Whatever goal was being used in the case of genetic algorithms or artificial life systems. Those systems have goals, but the early stages do not embody the goal in any way you could recognize.

> There was no goal at any point in the process.

So in the case of natural evolution, we happen to agree. However, I don't agree with your claim that "the implementation must embody the goal" is a useful way to think about this, and I also have some sympathy for the idea that there could be huge-time-scale teleology associated with evolution that we cannot discern.

Its conceivable that the universe could encode a goal somehow, after all its so vast, but that conceivability alone is not evidence for the existence of an encoded goal any more than the conceivability of extra-terrestrial intelligence, or of a higher design to reality, is proof of their existence. What science tells us is that the only goal nature seems to embody is following the physical laws we've been able to determine, and nothing more. I'd apply the same interesting hypothesis status to huge-time-scale teleology that we cannot discern, and perhaps it is both real and we will never be able to discern it. Personally I find the notions very interesting, but I don't see reason to believe in them. If there were good evidence for them, they'd be the subject of scientific study already.

But we seem to agree that natural selection doesn't have a goal. In my observation, any purported overarching goal that is ascribed to natural selection, including the measure of inclusive fitness[0], can be reduced to some function of the context in which it is being observed, like moth coloration was influenced by soot levels.

As to my main claim, I do believe it is necessary that an encoding of a goal is necessary for choice among actions in pursuit of a goal, because some kind of reference to a goal is necessary to compare options in a decision algorithm. In the case of a-life systems which have goals, that encoding is somewhere in the algorithm of evolution rules combined with the initial state of the simulation. In the case of nature, I don't see a place where that encoding could exist, except the trivial "goal" that all elements will follow the laws of physics.

Please note though that I never put it that "the implementation must embody the goal," I was more careful with my language by saying that it must have an accessible or working encoding of the goal, one its decision process or evolution rule would need to reference in order to make decisions that favored it. The encoding need not be internal (so embody is definitely not necessary), and none of these things are necessarily explicit or well partitioned (e.g. an evolution rule can implicitly encode a goal).

edit: addendum: [0] On inclusive fitness being reducible to situational factors, I'm just following the direction of M.A. Nowak, C.E. Tarnita and E.O. Wilson on this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09205

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 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.

It is not a model. It is a description. I'm torn on whether it would be correct to refer to the approach as constituting a sort of analogy.

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".

> 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...

> An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant".

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.

try telling that to quantum physicists... theyll just give you the wave function and say "well it works doesnt it"?

That's a bad take. I'm sure you can do a lot better than that.

i dont think youve understood it correctly

Except for the decades of experiments yielding validated predictions?

youve missed the point entirely

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

Hmm. I'm not sure there are many mushrooms poisonous to other mammals but not to us. We have almost exactly the same biochemistry after all.

Survival of the fittest is also a wrong way to think about evolution that leads many people to make assumptions that are backward.

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.

Nowadays evolution is waiting to be called "backpropagation".

> like to think of evolution as intelligent

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.

> $insane_argument_against_evolution

That looks like Perl variable syntax. Arguably the most mushroom like programming language.

There’s more than one way to be a fungi.

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.

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.

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

> Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point?

Yes, the second word of the title.

Yeah, that's not really good enough, by the author's own admission:

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

> he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance

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.

That's fine, all I'm saying is that if genes don't actually have intention, then the utility of modeling them as though they do must be strictly limited, if not an outright liability in some contexts. Use the heuristic at your own risk, but don't sell it as gospel truth.

> but don't sell it as gospel truth.

i dont think he did

> 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?"

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 :)

> By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process

a lot of assumption in this sentence. proof needed

Some are saying: "Don't come anywhere near me". Others are are saying: "Take a little, I'll show you a good time. Take too much... I will make you end your own life."

what others are saying works for hotdogs too :)

> 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".

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:

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).

Partly I am sure.

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 dig your style, you sound like my inner monologue :D

Natural selection cuts both ways.

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.

I appreciate your thirst for knowledge

Amanita Muscaria seems like it does use colour as a warning signal - it's bright red.

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.

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.

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.

Many good answers, but I'll add another angle I don't see any replies covering, which is that being poisonous/toxic is expensive. 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.

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.

Fruit bodies are reproductive organs, spores can survive digestion, and there are plenty of species that use animal waste as a substrate.

The same logic of hard seeds applies to spores.

It's really fucking suspicious that mushrooms evolved mechanisms to produce serotonin.

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.

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.

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.

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

But CBD does not need heat to convert.

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...

When was cannabis ever in the human food chain?

While not being cannabis, breast milk contains endocannabinoids.

Livestock used to eat cannabis back when it was a weed.

THC comes in a plant in the THCa form. CBD comes in CBDa form.

Both are not bioactive by default in their natural form.

All I'll say is go spend a day picking hops without gloves.

There are a large number of cannabinoids at play, some clearly (as in observably and demonstrably) are bioactive in their natural, unheated form.

---

None of which is said to endorse the other theory. Just to point out that claiming heat is required is incorrect.

The farm bill makes 'hemp' anything with below 0.3% THC legal. For this reason, we have a LOT of testing on the THC content of cannabis, since it is required to sell and manufacture. As it turns out, naturally cannabis quite commonly has >0.3% THC even before heating or activation of THCa.

Any human-like animal with our receptors eating a large amount would get high as fuck, cooked or not. A ruminant eating pounds of the stuff raw, would not be that different from a human consuming an ounce of baked pot.

This was killed in the recent budget bill: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/13/congress-thc-hemp-ban.html

Both degrade into actives over time or exposure to air/sun/warmth, and then into CBN, which is itself active.

THCa in cannabis plants is unstable. It will slowly convert to THC as it dries even at room temperature.

I thought it wasn’t generally psychoactive until heated?

Ibotenic acid, muscarine, psilocybin, amanitin, muscimol, THC, caffeine - these all natural pesticides target bugs primarily. Which are the biggest threat. Sort of funny how it also affects people though

It's a phytochemical that degrades readily in sunlight, it's likely both a UV protectant and aversive.

That's, like, your opinion, man

All spices basically too afaik.

Chilis, tobacco and tomatoes are all in the same family (nightshades). And they are all "New World" plants. Which means Europe had to live without them until 1600 or so. If you can call that living.

Don't forget the potato! Europe before the potato seems like a miserable place

yeah before potato they had lots of lots of turnips and rutabagas, it is little wonder they went out exploring the world looking for anything better to eat. the new world gave tonnes of food not just nightshade family plant mentioned earlier (gp left out eggplant btw) corn, sweet potato, chocolate, sunflowers, and pumpkins, squash, peanuts, pineapple, cranberry and turkey.

Eggplant is actually an old-world nightshade! Arabs brought it to Spain as early as the 8th century, probably from Southeast Asia

And coffee didn't make the jump until around the same time, either. No wonder Europeans wanted to be anywhere on the planet except Europe.

Coffee in Europe predates 1492 I think.

Coffee was around in Ethiopia and Yemen before that, but it didn't really spread in the Muslim world before 1500, and didn't spread from there to Europe until even later.

I've often had the mental image of Galileo trying to order a pizza and being very disappointed at the garlic bread that turned up.

Imagine Indian food without chilies… it’d be as dull as Russian food.

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)

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.)

Capsaicin as well

And birds are immune to it

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.

> animals are related to mushrooms

???

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.

Slightly related as mushrooms are closer to animal than to plants, as anyone in a grocery store would guess.

> anyone in a grocery store would guess.

Actually, I'd challenge that particular point.

Mushrooms seem to be found in the fresh fruit and vegetables area, rather than in the deli (meat and cheese), so that would probably point more towards them being considered "vegetables". Or fruit. ;)

Yep, however one wishes to classify them botanically, mushrooms are a vegetable in culinary usage (similar to tomatoes in that way).

I agree. Sorry, bad English. "as" -> "in oposite of" (or something like that).

It’s “alive” therefore it must have an early common ancestor and thus related… people like stretching definitions.

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”.

No.

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.

>so we farm incredible quantities of tobacco to extract its poisons.

Evolutionarily the best survival strategy.

A mushroom doesn't produce seeds, it produces spores.

If you pick a mushroom the spores use you, your clothes, your pets, your horses as vectors for spreading.

"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 edible, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think of those "genetic algorithm car thing" simulations that run in a browser.

weird stuff survives.

and good stuff crashes and burns sometimes.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAF35dekiAY

> What do mushrooms want?

I think it's a way of mushrooms saying "We don't think of you at all."

Horizontal gene transfer is looking a lot more common than we learned in biology class. Fungi have a class of proteins (Starships) which transfer hundreds of genes, beetles picked up cellulose-digesting proteins from bacteria in their digestive tract and embryos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_(genetics)

A corpse keeps other grazers away for the rest of the season.

The Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom ) talks about effects lasting for days, even in animal studies. Some of the historical records claimed effects lasting even longer, from months to years, though this sounds like triggered psychosis.

So perhaps not very recreational as might be assumed given the topic.

"Days"?!? Hard pass. My experiments with shrooms in college was fun, but I couldn't deal with the 8-12 hours of hallucinating.

I guess you didn't touch LSD? I think 12 would be considered short :)

I knew personally someone whose trips usually took 48 hours. Unusually long, yes, and really exhausting.

LSD had the same duration with me, but more psychological & emotional impact. So I avoided it for two reasons. Weirdly, all my divorced 50+ year-old male peers are now into K and DMT. They are raving about DMT, but I feel like my brain is too frail-as-is.

Interesting.

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 :)

Damn. 8-12? For me the peak always lasted 2-3 hours and I was sober again after 7 hours.

yea people in this thread saying 8-12 for psilocybin and 12 is short for LSD tells me these are either heroic doses or hyperbolizing.

Nah. Everything I've read about hallucinogens says dose doesn't change effect duration, only intensity. Drugs do affect people differently, so I wouldn't jump straight to saying they're exaggerating.

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.

Or testifying about how long it felt like.

you're right. i was only high for 20 minutes. happy now?

Mine lasted −12 + i hours, rotating through the imaginary plane.

Rotating as a function of what?

As a function of the observer: the machine elves!

they might be counting the “after glow” as part of the trip, others don’t

definitely not hyperbole. last time i took LSD i dropped at 5pm before going to dinner and ended up at a bread factory 15 miles away at 5am watching them run the big mixers. no idea how i got there just remember walking all night.

That's... odd. Sure it was LSD? It shouldn't cause dissociation like that.

yea that's not normal for LSD at all. NBOMe?

Sorry to use a reddit-ism, but "this should be at the top" - for safety.

I wonder if Hamilton Morris has tried it yet. Hamilton, if you're reading let us know when you're going to let us hear about it :)

For anyone vaguely interested in psychoactive/psychedelic drugs, his books and videos are amazing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia

Sounds like Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...

Incredible! A mushroom that bruises blue, but the visions are seemingly unlike traditional tryptamines, and there's no psilocybin found in the mushroom. Also no muscimol present (the thing in Fly Agaric, the 'other' type of hallucinogenic mushroom compound) yet there's definitely a consistent syndrome of hallucinations if you eat it undercooked.

Could this mean we're on the brink of discovering an entirely new class of hallucinogens?

From the Wikipedia

> 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

xiǎo rén rén? Like “small people”? Okay, if the mushrooms are literally called little guy mushroom and you see little guys running around then surely this is an old discovery.

Well yes ofc this is an old "discovery". Boletes are known choice edibles around the world so ofc people would discover that if they undercook this mushroom they would trip. We even have some written history about it:

> 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.

I'm not sure a vague passage from 1700 years ago is much in the way of evidence, especially given he claims the mushroom is a 10 inch tall person riding a carriage which you see before you consume it.

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.

It doesn't count until an occidental university has written some stories about it and claimed to be the real discoverer due to having put some stuff in one of their taxonomies.

It doesn't look like 小人人 refers to the mushrooms. It refers to the hallucinations, and is not necessarily expected to include visions of people:

> "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.

> mushroom sized > blue when bruised > make see small fairy people

did they found the schtroumpf village ?

Is any of the variants called gargamel or a latin variant of it in the scientific name 'by accident'?

Aka the Smurfs in English.

yep, sorry I forgot it was not the same name in english

Or a new reality…

These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does.

I don’t think the article was insinuating that these mushrooms were a new discovery, they’ve been known not just in the region but to scientists for some time, though they did assert that this is the first time that the DNA had been sequenced.

What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals.

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.

I think the point GP was making was to take issue with framing like "and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals."

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)

You would love the readings from Mckenna and the DMT, and the concept of Fractal Time.

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.

Lived in Yunnan for over a decade, primarily as a vegetarian. Mushrooms there are indeed many and varied and quite tasty. Many poisonings annually but the government are pretty good at helping people to ID with warning posters. Personally ate many mushrooms that looked like this and never had hallucinations. Did have some others which made me feel a little ill, however. I suspect locals are unduly relaxed about types science would avoid due to hepatoxicity.

While occasionally FOAFs would get hallucinogenic effects from dining, I don't recall explicitly hearing of anyone seeing little people, or hearing the term he details in this writing. As such, I wonder where this guy gets his info from. Certainly, most Yunnanese would describe these mushrooms as 牛肝菌 ("bolete") and more specific Chinese common names for similar reddish species would include 桃红牛肝菌 ("peach-colored bolete"). As a general type, they are very common in markets across much of Yunnan.

Given the claims, the clearly infrequent effects, and the personal experience I can trust, I would conclude with three theories: perhaps either the compounds are rapidly degraded when non-fresh, safely broken down when cooking (traditionally these mushrooms are cut thinly before sauteeing or boiling in hotpot), or there are one or two "look alike" species which are more rarely found and contain additional compounds which are responsible for the occasional effects.

According to Wikipedia, the Yunnan mushrooms indeed have their hallucinogens broken down after cooking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom

Good guess!

Although, the local hospital records imply that hallucinations can last for days or even months, so uh, probably not a great idea to go looking for them...

According to a voluminous illustrated tome I acquired during my extended stay, Yunnan has at least seven species of native psilocybe. Like nearby areas along the Himalayas, cannabis and opium are endemic and widely utilized in traditional cultures of the area. Heroin processed in Myanmar became a problem in rural Yunnan the early 2000s and present-era government shut it down with a heavy-handed campaign around 15 years ago. These days it's probably trans-shipped more than locally consumed.

My guess would be there is probably some contamination with something ergot-like going on. Long-lasting but maybe hard to detect because such a small amount is needed for effect that it's easy to miss.

It is interesting how the hallucinations consistently represent tiny people/elves to the mushroom consumer, even across geography/culture.

I wonder what the brain is doing…

Could be that the mushroom just temporarily interferes with the substances the elves put in our water supply to keep us in the dark?

s/elves/government

exactly, the real question is what the elves are doing while they’re unseen.

They keep the universe running.

Making toys, caring for reindeer, sleight maintenance, ...

And spook work for His Jolliness' Secret Service, to keep their Naughty and Nice databases current.

We should've asked Terence McKenna...

It could be a subspecies of the "machine elves"...

This was my first thought as well. I've always been fascinated by written accounts of DMT triggering such oddly specific effects for users.

I can answer the what, that parts easy!

The real question is WHY they keep stealing my underwear and left-foot socks?

This is some real antimemetics stuff here :) (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub if you're not familiar)

Yeah the mushrooms are obviously an amnestic that lets you see the elves which are usually antimimetically cloaked.

Amazing rabbit hole, thank you for link.

Would be interesting if the chemical mechanism is related or similar to the DMT one that creates the "machine elves" experience.

Yeah, the machine elves rabbit hole is interesting for sure. I hope a lot more rigorous science delves into both mushrooms and DMT

Someone has to support consciousness and reality I guess, thanks to the elves I say…

I had a DMT breakthrough experience and was able to communicate, via something like Neuralink, to the entities and for me they did not look like machine elves, but rather some type of alien (a bit like species 8472).

So not everyone is seeing elves is my point here.

These mushrooms are small, these elves are far away.

You will get a kick out of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVUuoXAkuUg a Corridor Crew video on in-camera forced perspective effects.

Occam’s razor would say they’re real.

Lilliputian hallucinations are also common in mental illnesses with hallucinations. Definitely some kind of physical foundation for it in the human brain.

I imagine it is something similar to pareidolia.

reminds me of trip reports from people trying Salvia Divinorum - there's even a name for these tiny people, 'Smelves'

Since we're in the topic of elves and common hallucinations, I want to share these Salvia trip replicas that some say are extremely accurate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2IRKuS3sSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65XfIpJdlEY

It gets the visuals accurate, but the experience includes a lot of physical sensation that is very difficult to convey, e.g. the 'wind' that pushes you back and the discomfort of going into a chaotic dissociated state. You see those things but it feels very 'real'.

Wow, looks terrifying!

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.

I think it makes sense given the following:

- 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.

>Caffeine increases pareidolia

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 wonder what lab rats would experience - lots of tiny rats ?

I’m sure there’s some boring neuro-chemical explanation for this, and I won’t doubt or deny the neuro-chemical explanation, but the fact that there’s a mushroom that consistently brings about hallucinations of tiny people is so bizarre that I kind of want to indulge in equally bizarre explanations. Maybe it’s not a hallucination and this mushroom simply allows us to see the tiny people all around us. Maybe mushrooms are intelligent and are intentionally making us hallucinate tiny people.

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.

Perhaps human-like creatures are so common in drug hallucinations because we're human, social animals, creatures who are maximally interested in other humans. If you gave drugs to dogs then perhaps they'd see human-like things mixed with dog-like things. I assume crocodiles, solitary animals, would see nothing besides wounded fish or maybe sexy female crocodiles.

If I remember correctly, the properties mentioned in this document are well-known and commonly found in mushroom field guides or scientific literature written in the Chinese language.

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%...

The next step should be to send enthusiasts there, get samples of this mushroom from that market, and introduce it to the underground for personal research. That’s normally what happens when something interesting is discovered.

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!

The natalensis story is even stranger: the underground was growing what they thought was natalensis for many years, until someone finally did the sequencing and found out that what everyone had grown and loved was actually new to science. At this point last year, their "natalensis" received its proper scientific name, ochraceocentrata. The underground then had to go out and fetch some actual natalensis, which is only just now being introduced to those circles (eg by Yoshi Amano). I haven't yet tried true natalensis, but ochras are definitely distinguishable from the usual cubensis, experentially, and I'd heartily recommend them to anyone that likes that kind of thing.

The issue is lanmaoa asiatica is ectomycorrhizal, meaning it grows exclusively on the roots of certain plant species in a symbiotic relationship. This is not like TTBVI or p. ochraceocentrata (misclassified as p. natalensis until recently) where amateurs can produce grain spawn with relative ease. Cultivation would involve planting or having access to the correct host species (Yunnan pine) which is a prohibitive barrier for most.

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.

Author flies around the world to find a shroom that makes reality feel like Super Mario and didn't even bite into one... lost opportunity

Common Side Effects anyone?

Probably something like temporary death and teleportation

Was my first thought as well. I had no idea those little guys were based on something real.

SWIM would like to know how to get paid as (instead of paying to be) "an expert who explores new mushrooms".

Someone Who Isn't Me?

Yes, this was a common phrase in early psychedelic and other drug experience sharing forums. Like a verbal talisman people believe kept them from incriminating themselves. I haven't thought about it in years. Delightful.

Yeah - I was going to ask... for a friend

> Someone Who Isn't Me?

Funny, I saw “SWIM” and reasoned “Someone Who Is Me”, thinking “is not” would be represented as “Is Not” instead of the contraction. :)

In some online drug forums it was believed that if you used SWIM instead of I for all of your posts, the government was powerless to use any of the posts against you. You can still find threads on forums where everyone is saying SWIM did this and SWIM experienced that as if they have discovered a loophole to protect themselves from the law.

It always reminded me of those FTP servers in the early days of the internet that had big warning banners declaring the law enforcement was not allowed to connect.

I feel like most people didn't actually believe it would somehow grant them legal protection but still used it kinda tongue-in-cheek. I think it's kinda cute and still use "my friend Swim..." in a joking way when talking about legally dubious escapades

I always feel like they should bring along an artist for the trip so we can get a visual depiction of what it was like

And a poet.

Ride my Llama

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMC3DjAFQEs

Exploring new mushrooms is more likely to end in agonizing death than piercing the veil of reality.

no, statistucally not.

but yeah, a warning is warranted.

Major in biology, do a grad program in medicinal chemistry, join a lab that already studies this.

(I know folks who read PiHKAL and thought "Hmm, this would be a nice ML training/prediction exercise")

some breadcrumbs for your SWIM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Morris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia

Reminds me of Lem's The Futurological Congress. Where drugs were speculated to be used in wars to make people imagine war machines. Much cheaper solution to make opponent imagine a bomber plane than actually to build enough of them...

Which reminds me of the psychoactive assault makers in Lina Nguyen's nanotech novels.

I feel like the natural test to do is: do experiments, and see if different people see the same little people doing the same things. That would move the observations from subjective to objective perspective.

Testing the theory of whether psychedelics are just inside our heads or whether our consciousness travels somewhere objectively really is why this Tales From The Trip video is my favorite videos. Both men see the same blue woman which is very interesting! https://youtu.be/P_34oNWmNsc?si=_k2CG5b-TVuDaFvM

I wish it were another dimension, or breaking through the Matrix. I never had the chance to experience such items but look forward to doing so.

Looks like the site is being hugged to death. Here's another instance of the article (I think).

https://attheu.utah.edu/science-technology/mushroom-causes-f...

When mice are given chemical extracts of Lanmaoa asiatica, their behavior shifts noticeably compared to controls.

Doesn't say how, for some reason. I presume they are shocked to see tiny mice, but I would like to know what behaviors they exhibited.

Are they seeing tiny mice...or are they seeing the same 2cm tall "people"?

That reminds me of Mckenna/Peter Meyer and the fractal time.

https://www.fractal-timewave.com/articles.php

You can get a free-libre Unix timewave generator there:

https://github.com/kl4yfd/timewave_z3r0

It's a bit pseudo-science but some Chinese wrote an article on the I-Ching and patterns and it can have a bit of truth on it.

https://vixra.org/abs/2409.0093 [ Chinese, use whatever tool you like to translate it]

I said this because both Mckenna and Peter did writtings about DMT and the experiences under it:

https://scribe.rip/illumination/terence-mckenna-explores-the...

>Terence had symbolically left a single mushroom standing in the middle of the hut. As they sat there, for a fleeting moment Terence saw “not a mature mushroom but a planet, the earth, lustrous and alive, blue and tan and dazzling white.” Dennis saw the exact same image and concluded the experiment had been a success. Terence was not convinced.

I saw this in a dream too; but I remember descending uber fast from space to home, as if I were in a amusement ride, that one where you are dropped at high speeds from a fair height, but with far more vertigo. Also, I was in space in some kind of a capsule before the jump.

McKenna also talked quite a bit about talking to little elves on DMT.

These could be leftovers from genetical, hereditary fears (and helpful feelings) against wild beasts since prehistoric times.

Or it could be evidence that consciousness is more complicated and interconnected than we think. Regarding the time wave I actually purchased the software but haven’t managed to get it to run. I like a lot of mckennas ideas but I do get the sense that he went off the deep end towards the end. Maybe it had something to do with his brain cancer.

http://www.levity.com/eschaton/sheliak/shelform.pdf

Also:

Timewave zero for Unix:

https://github.com/kl4yfd/timewave_z3r0

The whole page has more info on the formalization:

http://www.levity.com/eschaton/sheliak/

It appears there are several blue staining boletes in the same genus that grow in the US. Seems like a fertile area for study.

Psilocybin always gives me fairytale like, animated and very vivid hallucinations. Would be curious how these differ.

I have a friend who gave up taking regular magic mushrooms because he always hallucinated tiny Power Rangers.

Interesting. Did he find it boring, annoying, disturbing, or what?

Giving up right when its getting good

I say it again, fungi and cephalopods are the closest things to aliens we have on this world.

The more I look at Animalia species the more I tend to judge this is all alien compared to ... mountains.

Eyes, hair, hands, feet, genitalia : this all becomes pretty weird if I look at it "objectively".

It's all star dust on a fast enough time scale.

Right ?

But then what the hell are "mathematics" ?

Aparently 见手青 is mildly toxic yet commonly consumed in Yunan.

Spinach too is mildly toxic because of its oxalate content yet we eat it all the time. Some of those toxic saponins even have certain health benefits. There are plenty other examples of toxic foods we regularly consume: legumes contain deadly saponins, beets contain oxalates, and potatoes contain glycoalkaloids

From what I read Suillellus luridus (见手青) is completely fine when cooked

Meat is also toxic when eaten raw; that is not generally held to be a reason to avoid eating it cooked.

What toxins does raw meat contain? Or are you referring to bacteria contaminated raw meat?

Doesn't have to be bacteria. Raw meat can contain any kind of horrifying contamination. Viruses, bacteria, mold, nematodes... there is no limit. It's the perfect substrate for everything.

Living toxins are much worse than nonliving ones because the living toxins can reproduce to dangerous levels even if you consume a tiny dose.

But if for some reason you think they're not dangerous, foods that contain nonliving toxins when unprocessed are also commonly eaten; a major example would be cassava. See also acorns, nardoo, fugu, and the Greenland shark.

Most things prefer not to be eaten; you can't let that stop you.

Reminiscent of Terence McKenna and his DMT elves…

Let's get Rockefeller up in here

It's Elves all the way down.

Paging https://paulstamets.com

PS: wouldn't it be nice to actually be able to ping his DID from anywhere?

Experts

I was disappointed that the article doesn't contain pictures of these little people.

It does but the liliputians are invisible on photographs unless you’ve eaten the undercooked mushroom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottingley_Fairies_1.jpg

Strangely enough, I just finished listening today to this podcast episode on the Cottingley Fairies (it’s a great listen):: https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/phot...

Easy, eat another well known species of uncooked mushrooms so that your camera is now able to eat the mushroom.

Hmm... having trouble getting that URL. Archive.org has a recent snapshot at https://web.archive.org/web/20251226204255/https://nhmu.utah...

No the site is just having its own "fairytale-like hallucinations"

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20251226204255/https://nhmu.utah...

https://archive.ph/CwDtf

Hugged to death. Archived mirror: https://archive.is/CwDtf

Site seems to be overwhelmed rn. https://archive.vn/CwDtf

If used can we hallucinate and predict the HN news of tomorrow(especially any acquisition related news)?

yes,but you wont care.

Let's ban it before anyone finds out if it's useful

Just need a minority in America to associate it with

Do you lot ever get tired of saying stuff like this? It’s not 2016 anymore, there’s no need for it.

Buddy relax. It's a joke about the way the drug war has historically developed. You might get more out of it if you read some history about marijuana in the US

You can stop though. Nobody on this side is served well by these ideas.

Sorry, do you think anyone isn’t aware of this factoid? Why do you think your comment is immune to criticism just because it references a historical event?

You appear to lack the historical knowledge to appreciate the joke:

The war on drugs was specifically designed to allow the government to go after the left and black people. Nixon's domestic policy chief said this in 1994:

* https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminal...

What makes you think I lacked the context here?

Because you failed to see how the historical context made it funny, and even responded in kind of a vicious way.

Why does the historical context make it funny? Is everything that references a historical event funny?

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