How Caffeine Evolved to Help Plants Survive and Help People Wake Up | Hacker News Reader

How Caffeine Evolved to Help Plants Survive and Help People Wake Up

nytimes.com

67 pointsBud12 comments

One of the most successful adaptive strategies on earth right now is to be delicious and/or addictive to humans. It guarantees you'll get planted and tended at large scale. :-)

It's also useful to be cute or produce nice flowers. Then humans will even build houses for you and work hard to provide food and entertainment.

It's also caused the extinction of many things. I don't know if that's really the winning track.

>I don't know if that's really the winning track.

It is usually either evolutionary irrelevant or advantageous for one species to cause the extinction of another. It can help to eliminate resource competition or predators.

I think the fitness landscape is too complicated to justify that kind of assessment. Even with the non-universal qualifier "usually". I think a more correct statement would be to replace "usually" with "can be", and mention the possibility of it also being disadventageous or disasterous. At this point the entire statement becomes somewhat meaningless, though. Maybe it should just be "too complex to assess without a study per-ecosystem; it depends".

I'm sure someone more familiar with the research can express all of this mathematically and and confirm of deny the existance of an overall, cross-cutting model. It may even be common knowledge in evo bio/ecology/etc.

All I can mention on my phone right now is "keystone species", "s curve", and "wolf/rabbit populations". (or was it elk?) anyway, the latter search term leads to info on cyclical and highly dynamic ecologies. Check it out.

> When insects feed on caffeine-spiked nectar, they get a beneficial buzz: they become much more likely to remember the scent of the flower.

This sound very interesting. But has it been reproduced experimentally? I would be very interested in seeing the results of such an experiment, as I'm not sure this would happen (at least not if the animals live in the wild).

Yes, just last year:

>We provide evidence that plant compounds pharmacologically alter pollinator behavior by enhancing their memory of reward. Honeybees rewarded with caffeine, which occurs naturally in nectar of Coffea and Citrus species, were three times as likely to remember a learned floral scent as were honeybees rewarded with sucrose alone.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1202.full

Thanks for the reference! I can't access the article though, so I'll ask you: was this experiment conducted in the wild, or in a laboratory?

Trained bees, so laboratory. On the side, it's always worth googling the paper in question and poking around a bit. This is at the top of google result for the paper title: http://phys.org/pdf287643238.pdf

A better title would be "How Caffeine-producing Plants Evolved to Survive and Help People Wake Up". Caffeine itself is just a substance, it's hard to say it evolved by itself.

I'm not sure there's a meaningful distinction there. Caffeine is the (current) end product of an evolutionary process. If we went out and killed every caffeine-producing plant in existence today but continued to synthesize caffeine ourselves, caffeine would still be a product of evolution and would still exist, despite the fact that its "reproduction strategy" has changed from "biosynthesis by plants" to "industrial synthesis by humans", and that its continued existence is mediated by memes, not genes.

Caffeine appeared when plants started producing it, however it must have evolved from a similar molecule. I guess it makes more sense to talk about evolution of larger molecules like proteins, but the title isn't completely wrong.

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