Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
nhmu.utah.edu408 points by astronads 20 hours ago
408 points by astronads 20 hours ago
https://archive.is/CwDtf
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? 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. 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... THC comes in a plant in the THCa form. CBD comes in CBDa form. Both are not bioactive by default in their natural form. 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. There are some flowers which produce tiny amounts of caffeine in their nectar, apparently to give the pollinators a buzz. 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. 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. Don't forget the potato! Europe before the potato seems like a miserable place 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. It's not that suspicious- many molecules in nature are made from the same few precursors like cholesterol, amino acids, etc. and on top of that there's pressure for plants/fungi to evolve molecules similar to ones animals use in order to affect them. The brain is a fiber network like the mycelium, likely the same genes (animals are related to mushrooms) and neurotransmitters are involved in its function. > 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. 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?" 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. 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. > 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). 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. 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. A more intuitive and natural phrasing, even though it's invalid in a technical sense. I've noticed this happens when people talk about computers/software as well ("it thinks the variable is set", "it freaks out if it doesn't get a response", etc). Outside of formal writing/presentations, using only technical terminology seems to take a suboptimal amount of effort for both speaker and listener compared to anthropomorphizing (unless, as you mention, the listener is a layman who gets the wrong idea). It’s a useful start to move away from “it’s just random” but it’s just so different it doesn’t help in many cases. It’s not approximately the same. It definitely is not useful. Your model should at least attempt to approximate reality, not to depart from it by putting effect before the cause. That way lies madness. 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. 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 Dawking 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? > Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point? Yes, the second word of the title. 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. 0) What do humans have to do with it? We're not the only animals that eat mushrooms. that's exactly the point, the _lack of_ humans during its evolution is what it has to do with us, a mushroom may be poisonous to the species that it evolved around, while at the same time not being poisonous to humans I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one. I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat. > 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? 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. Of course there is bias, the bias is provided by the natural environment where the organisms coded by the genome must thrive or die. The bias is applied after the mutation occurs, but the mutations themselves are random, or nearly so. Probably there is some differential rate between the likelihood of each of the four base pairs to mutate into each of the others, but I would guess its nearly parity, because that would probably be close to optimal (though that depends on the details of the genetic coding scheme, ie the triplet code that translates nucleotide triples into amino acid codons). There are multiple constraints that I can immediately identify. Maximal temperature extremes, barometric pressure, atmospheric/substrate compositions, etc. The bias is inherent to the history of the planet Earth and the gradients present across that time and space. I'd say it's highly constrained. Only a tiny percentage (around 1%) of the DNA in chromosomes codes for proteins. And yes, certain mutations are favored precisely because of the chemistry constraints (an extremely basic one is which base pair changes actually alter the resulting protein; a more sophisticated one is which amino acid changes alter the physical functionality of the protein). But is the diversity really that staggering?
I mean most animals including possibly dinosaurs that have ever existed share a lot of internal organs, in the same place. They have eyes, brain (with a lot of the same brain areas, even birds have something like a prefrontal cortex but it's called something different).
They all have legs, torso, head.
I would say there is a lot more commonality than difference. The differences come from slight variations on a basic template that works, and then the body looks different and so on. 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! Why does it need some kind of boundary? What if it was operating on a limitless trajectory? That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate. Epigenetics can arguably be an example of what the comment means by narrowing the search space. You can have heritable changes to gene expression that are not part of your genome, but are a result of feedback from the environment (and not random mutations, viability of which natural selection will judge over future generations) As a general rule of thumb: 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! 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. 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. This is getting downvoted for the same underlying reason I’ve already pointed out elsewhere in the thread: it follows the same red flag "I’m not $1, but $2" pattern, just expressed in a different form. "Maybe won’t be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but..." is a rhetorical hedge that serves the same function: preempt criticism, then introduce a claim framed as rescuing evolution from an implied flaw. That’s social weasel-wording, not epistemic caution, and HN reliably downvotes it. On top of that, citing an uncritical Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan is about as many red flags as you can stack in one sentence. As you must know but don't state, both are infamous for repackaging long-settled evolutionary biology as contrarian insight, often using the same "search space", "random walk", and "junk DNA" language that shows up in intelligent-design adjacent arguments. Nothing described here is new or controversial. Regulatory DNA, morphological variation on shared templates, and highly constrained evolutionary pathways have been mainstream biology for decades. Presenting them via a podcast anecdote, framed as a fix for "pure random walk", just reintroduces the same strawman of evolution that people have already corrected multiple times in this thread. And recommending a Joe Rogan interview with somebody like Bret Weinstein, after admitting you know it won’t be viewed favorably (for very good but unstated reasons), is a disrespectful waste of people’s time. That’s why it’s being downvoted. > $insane_argument_against_evolution That looks like Perl variable syntax. Arguably the most mushroom like programming language. > 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. 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)) 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. >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. 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. 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. I've watched a documentary on mushrooms. Their posion is not a defense mechanism in most (all? don't remember) cases. It is just a consequence of the fact that mushrooms need to dump the excess Nitrogen somewhere, and that is related to the fact that most posionous mushrooms are those who thrive in Nitrogen-rich environments, like a leaf forest floor. And unfortunately for us, Nitrogen is a component for many creative biologically active substances.
FWIW, human is the best mushroom's friend, when you cut it and carry around you seed tons of spores, so as a sibling comment said, mushrooms would not need to develop anti-human defenses. It's just that some of them got (un)lucky when played the chemical roulette while trying to figure out how to get rid of Nitrogen waste. Its the same evolutionary patterns that plants went through. 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. Insects have the some of the same neurotransmitters as mammals, but they can be relaying different things. For example, dopamine is not used for reward learning, but for aversion learning and pain. Even in humans it has multiple roles, such as for movement (as in Parkinson's disease), and various signals around the body, excreting salt, calming down T-cells. > Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our brains. True for coffee as well (if you substitute psychedelic with a more appropriate word). Yep, thats a good one. Caffeine is deadly to insects, but a mostly safe stimulant for us. Nicotine also comes to mind. Plants have developed tons of defense mechanisms that are deadly to one class of animals, but useful or only mildly deterrent to others. Avians are immune to capsaicin, but an irritant for mammals.. except for some hairless primates. Plants want to be eaten only by big animals that take them on long and random walks and then die far away from where they are picked up to fertilize the seed. Which also explains the talking Ameglian Major Cow on the menu at Milliways, in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: when you confuse evolutionary outcomes with intent, you end up with livestock enthusiastically volunteering for dinner. 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. > 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. > What do mushrooms want? I think it's a way of mushrooms saying "We don't think of you at all." "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. 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 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. I think of those "genetic algorithm car thing" simulations that run in a browser. weird stuff survives. and good stuff crashes and burns sometimes. 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. Amanita Muscaria seems like it does use colour as a warning signal - it's bright red. There are other bright red mushrooms (especially russulas) which are quite tasty. Russulas also can have many other bright colors. Conversely, many of the deadliest mushrooms where I live are plain and unassuming, at least in the color spectrum I can see. Not exactly. You can eat that mushroom but you'll have indigestion problems. Squirrels around me love it though. You can also parboil it and you'll be fine, which it is actually quite tasty. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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: "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. 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 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. 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. That's not true at all. Today's occidental universities would have to pay faux homage to "the poor helpless natives" who were the original custodians of the discovery but were too uncomplicated to do much with it, so with their wonderful generosity these kindly westerners did them the great service of elevating their voices, etc. Sick casual racism bro, got any other hot takes for us? Are you claiming that people who think that way are racist? That's violent unsanctioned speech, bro. Calling criticism "violent unsanctioned speech" is a tired, adolescent MAGA-adjacent move: provoke with loaded caricature, then reframe accountability as persecution. We can see the same pattern across your other comments: sweeping "regime and cronies" rhetoric, insinuations without evidence ("what did Obama get in return?"), mocking humanitarian concern as manipulation, and then retreating to grievance when challenged. That’s not satire; it’s MAGA-adjacent culture-war edgelording. If you didn’t want your comment read as endorsing racist tropes, you shouldn’t have put those tropes on the page without explicit rejection. Accountability isn’t censorship, and criticism isn’t violence. This isn’t people being uncharitable; it’s you repeatedly falling back on insinuation, irony, and persecution narratives when your rhetoric doesn’t land. > 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'? These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does. 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. 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. 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%... 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... 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? 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. exactly, the real question is what the elves are doing while they’re unseen. I can answer the what, that parts easy! The real question is WHY they keep stealing my underwear and left-foot socks? We should've asked Terence McKenna... It could be a subspecies of the "machine elves"... Making toys, caring for reindeer, sleight maintenance, ... And spook work for His Jolliness' Secret Service, to keep their Naughty and Nice databases current. 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. 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… 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: 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. Lilliputian hallucinations are also common in mental illnesses with hallucinations. Definitely some kind of physical foundation for it in the human brain. reminds me of trip reports from people trying Salvia Divinorum - there's even a name for these tiny people, 'Smelves' 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. 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 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 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... SWIM would like to know how to get paid as (instead of paying to be) "an expert who explores new mushrooms". 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") 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. 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 > 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. :) 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 Exploring new mushrooms is more likely to end in agonizing death than piercing the veil of reality. 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. 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. Psilocybin always gives me fairytale like, animated and very vivid hallucinations. Would be curious how these differ. 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... 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. 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. It appears there are several blue staining boletes in the same genus that grow in the US. Seems like a fertile area for study. I have a friend who gave up taking regular magic mushrooms because he always hallucinated tiny Power Rangers. 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. I say it again, fungi and cephalopods are the closest things to aliens we have on this world. 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. 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. 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... If used can we hallucinate and predict the HN news of tomorrow(especially any acquisition related news)? 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
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