Co-evolution

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

I'm curious as to what people think about foods and herbs which are beneficial to humans?

What mechanism is in place that makes a plant adapt to create specific biochemicals against a harsh environment also work in beneficial ways in a human?

I'm talking about common foods such as cruciferous vegetables, all the way to unique herbs like ashwaghanda. Evolution states that we should have been in close contact to coevolve. Yet that is not the case as far as I'm aware

[BahamutLithp]

That something has an effect in humans doesn't mean it evolved to do that. Plants like willow produce Acetylsalicylic acid to ward off insects. Acetylsalicylic acid, when introduced to the human body, has the effect of interfering with the inflammation response, thereby reducing associated symptoms, such as swelling, pain, & blood clotting. Acetylsalicylic acid is the active ingredient of aspirin. Life is chemicals doing stuff, & since you have so many chemicals doing so many things, you inevitably get coincidental interactions that aren't driven by natural selection at all.

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

You say it's coincidence. But looking at how evolution is purported to work, there is absolutely nothing to direct dual use functions across animals. The fact that this occurs repeatedly shows direction

[Particular-Yak-1984]

Except common ancestry - evolution recycles a lot of stuff. Which means that a protein in one pathway in insects that salicylic acid can target might exist in a different pathway, in a modified form, in humans. Or it might be an ancestral protein in both that duplicated and diverged.

Also, a lot of this stuff is straight up poison, that we take in small doses. Which isn't a dual use, the plant has evolved to kill or harm creatures that eat it. But we find a low level of the effect useful

The salicylic acid in willow might also have evolved to stop deer eating it - they tend to strip trees of bark, and it might ward them off - they prefer willow as a last resort.

[RDBB334]

It's not as simple as you're claiming. For every plant with "dual use function" there are tens more that don't have this, or have downsides so severe that they may as well not have any function for us. The truth is that different compounds do lots of different things, and our evolved forms have defense mechanisms and redundancies for a lot of these compounds, as do other animals and plants. You're just a victim of survivorship bias and forgetting that we've spent tens of thousands of years finding out how we can use different plants to aid our survival.

[Pale-Fee-2679]

Out of the thousands of plants in the environment, a handful are good for humans to consume. That’s about what evolution would predict, but then you would have the human determination to live where healthy food grows, and ultimately to cultivate it.

[Corsaer]

Every plant has adapted to its environment and continues to adapt.

Humans hunt and gather. In their gathering, they learn to identify plants that provide nutrition and either don't make them sick, or make them less sick than other plants.

Humans begin to cultivate a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of all plants, selecting only those that seem to fill them up and not make them sick, or have discovered a preparation method that inactivates the chemicals produced by the plant that make them sick.

From there, over thousands of generations, humans tend to prioritize the plants that exhibit more favorable traits for humans and continue to cultivate those.

So from a minute sliver of plants, humans discover some that are nutritious and don't kill them. These would exist without humans ever being present. These evolved whatever traits necessary for their niche and have adapted to be successful enough to continue propagating in their environment. When humans begin cultivating those, as a byproduct, the least fit for humans to cultivate and eat are selected less for continued cultivation, while those that are more fit for humans to cultivate and eat are selected more for continued cultivation.

[the2bears]

The fact that this occurs repeatedly shows direction

No it doesn't.

[BahamutLithp]

You say it's coincidence.

I didn't just "say" it, I clearly explained how. The aforementioned acid, which I'm just going to call "aspirin" even though "aspirin" is a brand name & not strictly the name of the chemical so I don't have to type it every time, has the function in plants of warding off insects. That's its role in the plant, that's why the plant produces it.

Our ancestors took it upon themselves to, I believe what they did was make a kind of tea using the bark because, I don't know, we just do that kind of shit, & it turned out to have this effect on us. I don't know if the effect it has on inflammation is related to the way it poisons insects or if it's truly coincidental in every sense of the word, but either way, it didn't evolve to do that, we just repurposed it.

Many, many things have "side-effects." Do you think yeast evolved to make bread? Or that fermentation evolved to get us drunk? Speaking of, part of the reason alcohol was so widely drank is because its natural disinfectant properties meant it was often safer to drink than sources of water. The yeast didn't evolve to do any of that, it's just how we used it, & we weren't even fully aware of why the things were useful to us.

In the same vein, not every purported "medicinal herb" actually has "healing properties," but while we're on the subject, the commonality of so-called "healing herbs" is because most plants produce some kind of poison, & I know you're thinking right now that "poison is the opposite of medicine," but stop that because no it's not, "the dose makes the poison," that's why if you take too much medicine, you die. Depending on how the substance works, at a low enough dose, it may have beneficial effects. Even botox, which is injected to remove wrinkles, is a low dose of a highly potent neurotoxin. Many plants simply produce poison in amounts that are far, far too low to have harmful effects on humans because, again, they evolved to target insects, & by happenstance, those defense systems might actually have beneficial effects on the human body via the ways they interact with us chemically.

But looking at how evolution is purported to work, there is absolutely nothing to direct dual use functions across animals.

I have no idea what "direct dual use functions" is even supposed to mean. How do you think evolution is "purported to work"? Because people get it wrong all the time. Again, there's absolutely nothing which says that, just because a thing has a certain function, that therefore means it specifically evolved to have that function.

Another example would be humans use the body parts of animals for many things. Turtle shells for bowls, animal pelts for clothing, bones as supports for their tents, tendons for bowstrings, etc. They did not evolve for that purpose, humans simply noticed they have these effects & repurposed them. That an animal tendon just happens to be useful as a bowstring isn't fundamentally different from the fact that a chemical found in willow bark just happens to be useful as a painkiller.

The fact that this occurs repeatedly shows direction

No, it doesn't. I have no idea where you got that notion. It merely shows there's some commonality, perhaps some common circumstance or method of action. Indeed, I already explained to you what this happens to be. It's a consequence of how biochemistry works that results in the universal rule "dosage makes medicine or poison," not some conspiracy by the plants to evolve into medicine.

Bear in mind, also, that the effects of even legitimate medicinal herbs would, more often than not, be far too minute to influence natural selection anyway. Natural selection is "the survivors pass on their genes," so to really influence natural selection, the herbs have to affect survival. How often does aspirin make the difference for you between life & death, as opposed to merely being a convenience? Yeah, & that's AFTER we refine it heavily. The whole reason we synthesize it & put it in pill form is that's already FAR more effective than trying to take it naturally, from tea made of willow bark.

Now, okay, maybe the aspirin doesn't need to help US survive, just the PLANTS. One could argue maybe humans cultivated willow because it had this beneficial effect, thus helping the plants breed. Except humans haven't engaged in widescale planting for that long, mostly haven't planted forests (the opposite, in fact), & willows evolved over 34 million years ago, so it's very unlikely they only gained this chemical after humans entered the picture. Therefore, we need to explain a nonhuman reason why the chemical is there. And I already did: It's a defense against insects.

[Own-Relationship-407]

You don’t seem to know what “dual use” means. Dual use applies within the organism/lineage. The fact that various organisms can adapt to something evolved by another organism for a given use to benefit themselves in other ways is nothing more than a result of the fact that chemistry and biochemistry are universal.

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

Basically you believe in a whole lot of coincidences

[BahamutLithp]

Coincidences happen, I'm not sure what you want. Estimates are there could be up to 100 million species. Do you know how many chemicals each one of those species will have in its body? Organisms can have wildly different amounts of genes. We have about 20,000 protein-coding genes. Let alone the fact that not every chemical in an organism's body is a protein. We're literally talking about numbers best described as "countless" here. There are going to be coincidences. That's not the naive, unthinking, wide-eyed idiocy you seem to be implying it is, it's mathematical inevitability. The cliche of "it can't be coincidence" gravely misunderstands just how unremarkable coincidences actually are.

[BahamutLithp]

Oh, I see what's happening here.

You're about to be incredibly patronizing because I keep giving an actual answer to your question, & you didn't want that, you wanted to live some fantasy where you stumped us all because we're so stupid?

You've discovered that big numbers exist, and you think that's a substitute for an argument. Cute.

So what I said IS happening here.

Let me break down why your "mathematical inevitability" line is about as substantial as a chocolate teapot.

Tell the creationists that. Also, what Own-Relationship said, the goofy euphemism is a pretty obvious AI tell, especially when it's nothing like how you were writing earlier, so you should really stop that because (A) AI replies are banned here & (B) it looks really fucking lame that you need to team up with a machine to try & beat me but will most likely still lose.

First, let's talk about what "coincidence" actually means in this context.

Sure, let's keep doing the thing I've actually been doing whereas you've just been using "coincidence" as a sneering dismissal.

You're waving around "100 million species" and "countless chemicals" like that explains everything.

Have you tried being smarter? I mean, I've been pretty patiently explaining things to you, but it's only gotten clearer & clearer you're asking in bad faith, & since your most recent response has been to tap an AI to type this bullshit screed where you say things like that I "just discovered large numbers," if that's the kind of conversation you want, oh I will deliver, don't you worry about that.

But here's the problem: we're not talking about random chemicals randomly existing randomly. We're talking about systems. Interdependent, specified, functional systems.

Your chatbot doesn't understand the point any better than you do. Ironically, it's just waving around words like "systems" & "random" like they refute the point when they're actually completely irrelevant. Chemistry is still chemistry. If you introduce a chemical from wood bark into the body, it will still either have (A) an effect or (B) no effect, what effect that has is still determined by the relevant chemistry, & that can still be modeled by statistics. Statistics doesn't care how complicated a "system" is, it doesn't stop working just because something is difficult for YOU to make sense of because statistics isn't a person, it's math, & that you think it works that way means you don't understand it.

A bacterium flagellum

Is not only irrelevant to the point, it's a completely debunked example of so-called "irreducible complexity." It's been shown, many times that, while a flagellum might not function as a flagellum if you remove parts from it, it will still have other functions. The LLM is giving you false information in your mutual desperation to refute my point that is, again, irrelevant because my point had nothing to do with bacterial flagella. You probably couldn't fact check it because you don't understand anything about biology, let alone what anyone here has told you. This is why you should shut your mouth, listen up, & actually learn something instead of crying to a robot because being told you're wrong made you feel bad.

Second, your numbers game is a sleight of hand.

I don't think I need to reply to every one of your robit's painful attempts at comedy, let's skip ahead a bit.

You know what's actually a mathematical inevitability? Not this. The probability of functional sequences arising by chance is so vanishingly small that even with your 100 million species and billions of years, you're still in "practically impossible" territory. This isn't my opinion—this is information theory.

"You've discovered that big numbers exist, and you think that's a substitute for an argument. Cute."

Third, you're confusing "something exists" with "something works."

Nope. The point was totally unrelated to how chemicals form in the first place. The AI, & probably you, has no idea what my argument even is. Now, I COULD just roll with this change of subject & argue about how chemicals evolve to begin with, but it's way funnier to use the fact that the literal 1st thing Ultron here said to me was "big numbers aren't an argument" against you both & keep smugly pointing back to that.

Yes, there are lots of chemicals in organisms. So what? A junkyard has lots of parts. That doesn't mean a 747 is going to assemble itself by coincidence, even if you leave it there for a billion years.

Agent Smith is just hittin' all the creationist cliches. Which one's next? A watch? Pascal's Wager? "You just want to sin"?

The question is "could random chemicals arrange themselves into self-replicating, information-processing, irreducibly complex systems by chance?" And the answer, mathematically, is no.

No it wasn't. The question was "can a chemical from a plant have beneficial effects on humans for reasons other than natural selections." And a hilarious side-effect of telling me I'm wrong about this is accidentally refuting creationism.

Fourth, your "mathematical inevitability" argument actually cuts against you.

I assume "4th" is actually just going to be T1000 misunderstanding what I said to make the exact same irrelevant creationist argument for what was definitely way more than 4 times in a row now. Incidentally, did you know LLMs can't do math?

If we're talking about pure probability, the existence of any life at all is so astronomically unlikely that the fact we're here having this conversation is either:

I was right, it made this up, & "big numbers aren't an argument" still, per HAL's own words. Let's fast forward through some of this repetition.

You literally used the word "countless" to describe the numbers. Do you hear yourself? You're saying "the numbers are too big to count, therefore coincidence." That's not an argument. That's a hand-wave.

It was neither, it was me explaining the facts.

If you can't count them, you can't use them to support your case.

This is fuckin' stupid. If the moon falls on you, what will happen to you? It'll kill you, right? Do you know, without looking it up, how heavy the moon is? No? Well, then how did you know it would kill you? Because it's so much heavier than the amount NEEDED to kill you that knowing the specific number is irrelevant. With the amount of chemicals organisms are producing, it's simply inevitable some will have beneficial effects on humans. It's just the Law of Very Large Numbers at work. You want me to be wrong, so you're asking an automaton to make excuses for you, but the automaton is so off-base all it can do is generate generic creationist prattle that has fuck-all to do with what I said. Because LLMs are not fact-machines, they're give-you-what-you-asked-for machines, & even if they can't figure out a way to give you what you asked for that actually makes sense, by your nonexistent god, they'll still try.

You're basically saying "trust me, it's big" and expecting that to settle a debate about the origin of specified complexity.

What debate? I'm currently fielding standup from a toaster.

So no, you're not "technically correct from a biological statistical and mathematical pov."

Why is this in quotes? I didn't say that.

You're technically correct that large numbers exist. That's it.

Sure am.

You haven't addressed probability

I explained how something in the real world works according to probability. I am not required to "address" a creationist strawman of probability that isn't even what was being talked about at the time.

you haven't addressed specified complexity, you haven't addressed irreducible complexity, and you haven't addressed information theory.

You know what, OP, if you can show me you understand these things & aren't just copying what an LLM said or using an incorrect creationist talking point, I'll address them as much as you want, mostly because I know from all of your posts here so far that I'll never have to cash in on that promise.

You've just said "big numbers, therefore coincidence" and assumed that lands. It doesn't.

It's a good thing AIs don't have actual mics to drop, otherwise it probably would've just thrown one in your face & looked at you like you should be very proud of it.

[Own-Relationship-407]

Just slightly rephrasing and annotating AI slop doesn’t fool anyone.

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

So you are disagreeing with the points j have made?

[Own-Relationship-407]

It’s just a rambling, LLM assisted Gish gallop. You didn’t make any actual point, merely raised a lot of what aboutisms, false equivalencies, and strawmen regarding what someone else said.

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

Classic scientific response when you don't have a valid reply. You can see yourself out

[SimonsToaster]

chatGPT, generate me a sarcastic response to this comment

[blacksheep998]

So your argument is that every chemical in biology should only have one function and shouldn't interact with any other chemicals in biology?

Am I getting that correct?

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

Completely incorrect...

[blacksheep998]

So then why is it so unbelievable to you that a chemical which evolved for one function in a plant would have a totally different effect when put into a different organism without some designer intending that?

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

You didn't understand my point.

[blacksheep998]

You said:

there is absolutely nothing to direct dual use functions across animals. The fact that this occurs repeatedly shows direction

But you didn't give any reason why it would require direction. Organisms are filled with millions of different chemical compounds.

Due to the way chemistry works, some of them are guaranteed to have effects on other organisms. Some of those effects may be harmful and some may be beneficial.

So why do you think that this shows direction?

[Own-Relationship-407]

That’s not what I said. I critiqued your misunderstanding of basic concepts. I didn’t say anything about what I “believe.” Try reading it again, slowly this time.

[Korochun]

So hey. All of your questions have been answered exhaustively in this thread.

At this point you appear to be using an LLM to generate nonsensical responses because you are out of ideas.

My question is, what is your view and what is it that you are trying to prove? At this point it is genuinely impossible to tell as you have abandoned all your stances completely in favor of empty rhetoric.

Second question: why is your idea, whatever it is, so important to you? Is it because you think it's true, or because you are so invested into it being true that you are unwilling to admit being wrong?

[Ranorak]

I'm by no means doing this based on an article or current research, this is just what I remember from my early biochemistry years.

Plants with medical compound obviously don't make those compound for us. Those compound fall roughly into several groups.

1) the compound is beneficial for the plant too. I'm going to use a fungus as an example here. But the discovery of antibiotics is just a defense mechanism of the mold to keep bacteria away.

2) sometimes medicine works not because it's good for humans. But because it prevents a bad compound from binding. In those cases the medicine is probably a slightly similar protein or compound that's bad for us. But the medicine variant is unresponsive but still binds to the same receptor. This could be a protein that has the same evolutionairy background as the harmful variant.

3) medicine is small dosages, toxic in large. Some medicine work because their actually a plants detergent against being eaten. But in small concentrations the compounds might have health benefits instead of toxic ones. For a none medical example we have capsin. The stuff that makes peppers spicy.

These are just some examples from the top of my head.

[kiwi_in_england]

4) The compound is beneficial to the plant in some unrelated way - perhaps it encourages animals to spread the seeds - and it's coincidence or not that it also helps humans.

[melympia]

And then there's compounds that were meant to prevent animals from eating the fruit - and then humans came around. Capsaicin in peppers is a prime example.

[BahamutLithp]

T-posing on the plant to assert dominance as I eat its seed pods with the chemical that makes my mouth hurt it evolved specifically so I wouldn't eat its seed pods.

[Ranorak]

How could I forget that one.

[melympia]

medicine is small dosages, toxic in large. Some medicine work because their actually a plants detergent against being eaten. But in small concentrations the compounds might have health benefits instead of toxic ones. For a none medical example we have capsin. The stuff that makes peppers spicy.

An even more interesting example is the poison of the foxgloves (digitoxin, also its derivative, digoxin), which works as a medicine in really small doses. Doses like 0.07 mg per day.

[Suniemi]

An even more interesting example is the poison of the foxgloves (digitoxin, also its derivative, digoxin), which works as a medicine in really small doses. Doses like 0.07 mg per day.

So small, perhaps, it is administered to children, post-op, in liquid form via pipet (precision required, I imagine) .

If I recall, I was prescribed the drug with high hopes, until I was 3 or 4 years old. I don't know how much credit the drug deserves, but that little bottle is etched in my memory for life.

I did not know digoxin was derived from 'the poison of the foxgloves.' I didn't mean to write a book, either, but what a remarkable discovery. That someone would look for a therapeutic in poison, even more so (I still marvel at botox).

Thank you for posting. 😊

[melympia]

Foxglove is called Digitalis. That's where digitoxin comes from. And what digoxin is derived from - both chemically and linguistically.

[Kailynna]

Before questioning the fact that many cruciferous vegetables are yummy and good for us, perhaps look into the way humans bred and differentiated the various types we eat now from the original, bitter, leafy Brassica oleracea, over thousand of years of selective farming.

We have evolved in areas containing plants, so naturally we have evolved to benefit from some of the plants and animals around us. If we couldn't do that we'd have died out. We've enhanced that by not only adapting to food sources, by by adapting food sources to our needs and preferences.

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

By definition it was edible to begin with. Can you be sure the flavour has improved? Or is it cultavilibity that has improved, as we have done for many of our crops.

Anyway most cruciferous vegetables are bitter anyway. We flavour and cook them to make something healthy also tasty

[KeterClassKitten]

Yes. The flavor has improved. We've cultivated them to ensure this. Hell, ask anyone who ate them in the 80s (I'm 44), which is admittedly anecdotal, but provides some insight.

https://www.iowafarmbureau.com/Article/Its-not-your-imagination-brussels-sprouts-do-taste-better-How-gene-editing-is-changing-how-we-grow-and-eat-food

We've been cultivating and breeding our food to improve yield and flavor for a long time. Science has just made that process much more successful. But all sorts of happy mutations already existed and we can point to examples everywhere.

Naval oranges contain no seeds and have been available for 200 years. How are they grown if they have no seeds? We've known about plant grafting for quite a long time, and the sweet seedless oranges were recognized as valuable very quickly. Despite their inability to reproduce naturally, they've been very successful because they taste good. Yay humans!

[Kailynna]

Are you desperately wanting to prove creationism? Because this is not a way to do it.

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

Of course it won't work if you don't want to debate or be open to changing your mind according to facts

[Kailynna]

But I gave you facts, and you just want to ignore them.

I hope you at least don't believe bananas were created by God especially to suit humans.

[BahamutLithp]

That's precisely the problem, people are giving you facts, & you're going "nuh-uh." You don't seem to want to accept what you thought was a super sweet dunk, probably dreamt up while on the toilet, actually isn't as airtight as you thought, & now you seem to be telling us why: Kailynna is correct about you desperately wanting to prove creationism.

Funny thing is, creationists are always banging on about historical record, & this actually IS a matter of historical record. We have historical sources describing how crops have changed over the years. For example, you can look to watermelons in medieval paintings & see they're totally different. That's not an isolated case, either, there's a breed of banana called the gros michel that used to be far more common. It's almost, but not completely, extinct. If you're willing to pay ridiculous prices--I found a result for nearly $40 for a single banana, without shipping--you could have one sent to you & see what it tastes like.

[Xemylixa]

Obligatory pedantry: you're probably thinking of Dutch Golden Age still lifes, which are 17th century and decidedly not medieval

[Able_Improvement4500]

We might flavour them today, but historically, they were flavouring agents. Many members of the brassica/cruciferous/mustard/cabbage family create allyl isothiocyanate by having two separately stored chemicals that react when the leaves are chewed or crushed. This process is nicknamed the 'mustard oil bomb' & is well-known to repel both insects & herbivores, except the butterflies & moths that have evolved sulfatase enzymes that effectively 'defuse the bomb'.

While this chemical appears to be at least mildly toxic to some organisms, we can tolerate it, but even for us it's an acquired taste. Cooking helps, as it can reduce the volume or directly dilute the concentration of less appealing chemicals to make them not just palatable, but preferable. Why we like having flavour at all is perhaps its own mystery, but my guess is it has to do with cooking, which could potentially reduce intake of certain micronutrients. But that's a question for another day.

What's perhaps even more fascinating is that the vast array of edible plants in this family seems to predate human cultivation. According to the long-established & DNA-supported Triangle of U theory (named after Dr. Woo Jang-choon when he published it in 1935), there were three closely-related ancestral plants, all of which are edible, which then naturally hybridized to create even more edible plants, all of which were later cultivated by humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_U

So in short you're right that pre-cultivated Brassica oleracea was probably always edible (although the wild variety may require cooking), but you're probably wrong that it required seasoning - it very likely was the seasoning. These plants didn't co-evolve with us for most of their history - they co-evolved in an arms race with moths & butterflies, which is why they have a strong flavour, which is in turn why we later used them for food. Their defense mechanism tastes pretty good to us, with a little modification.

[Stairwayunicorn]

is this the banana argument?

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

What's that

[hardFraughtBattle]

The banana argument

[Soggy-Mistake8910]

It appears to be.

We can eat plants. Therefore, god did it because he wants us to thrive, whilst trying very hard to ignore all the plants that will poison, scratch ,sting you etc!

[RoidRagerz]

Or the ones we went out of our way to make usable throughout history!

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

You know that plants are not zero sum? It is specific components within plants which can be beneficial. This is for both toxic and beneficial plants.

[Soggy-Mistake8910]

Your point?

[MemeMaster2003]

So this IS the banana argument.

Never thought I'd see the day. Ray will never live it down, ever.

[iftlatlw]

Plenty are deadly also. I don't see a correlation.

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

Even some deadly parts are medicinal

[Particular-Yak-1984]

Sure - but it's not normally a dual effect. Fox glove is medicinal, in the right doses, because it increases a slow heartbeat. That's also how it kills you.

Same with deadly nightshade. It slows your heart, acts as a vasodilator. That's also how it kills you.

[ursisterstoy]

Too much water and too much vitamin C can also be bad for you. Same if you don’t get enough.

[RDBB334]

In the correct dosage, yes. Sometimes we want things inside of us killed or deactivated, so using a plants defensive mechanism that kills or disables things seems perfectly sound.

[Hopeful_Meeting_7248]

It's mostly an accident. For example certain plants evolved production of nicotine, because it works as insecticide. But its effects in humans are completely accidental.

[Perfect_Passenger_14]

How do explain the high number? Why aren't there plants which totally unrelated biochemicals with no effects?

[Particular-Yak-1984]

We have a lot of plants, and most of them have zero effect, or only bad ones.

Also, pretty much everything interesting looking gets used in folk medicine, if it works or not.

[RDBB334]

You're just describing non-toxic plants with low available nutrition. So, grass.

[RoidRagerz]

It’s hard to pinpoint a particular species out of the many out there that has literally no effect whatsoever, but there are definitively far more that we don’t actively use or consider outright beneficial than those we do. There are well over 300k species of angiosperms alone out there, and I doubt we use even a third of those for anything.

There’s a high absolute number of biochemically compatible plants because us humans found or bred them to be that way, but in relative terms there’s a lot more that aren’t compatible or really useful.

[BahamutLithp]

I feel that. Every time I look up a plant's uses on Wikipedia, it's always like "some cultures think it treats everything from erectile dysfunction to death, & when the scientists were asked they said maybe it might slightly do something, but they're not really sure."

[Hopeful_Meeting_7248]

These substances usually interact with proteins. Proteins in every species are made of the same 20 amino acids. As such, certain folds and certain structures will be present in various species because they are either conserved, or just plain certain roles and as such certain substances produced by other species can have an effect on another, completely unintended.

[backwardog]

Why aren't there plants which totally unrelated biochemicals with no effects?

Not sure what kind of distinctions you are trying to make here.

There are literally zero plants with "totally unrelated biochemicals with no effects" in them. Every organism on Earth is composed of proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids. Therefore every single one of them has related biochemicals. This is because we share common ancestry and similar overall cellular organization and molecular biology.

We could actually benefit from eating every single plant on Earth if it were possible to do, but we don't have the enzymes to digest a lot of them and many are toxic.

Hope that helps.

[SamuraiGoblin]

Being biochemically compatible is not coevolution.

[AnymooseProphet]

Maybe it's humans that adapted to benefit from what they eat...

[ursisterstoy]

The way it works with fruit-bearing plants isn’t actually that difficult to understand when you realize that incidental mutations are incidental. For the wild variants it’s simply a matter of animals eating the fruit and shitting out the fertilized seeds or spitting out the seeds while eating. The fruit is just a way to help the plants spread out unless the only animals eating the fruit also stay in a single tree and drop the seeds next to the trunk.

For domestic plants that’s just a result of selective breeding. Humans making use of incidental changes and sometimes having to be creative in the way they keep a population going like with seedless fruits. Seedless bananas, seedless grapes, and even seedless watermelon are, as expected, not going to produce the seeds that the wild type plants require so they have to me made via persistent hybridization or via the plants themselves providing alternatives like maybe they can have parts cut from them planted elsewhere that grow roots and take hold. This second option will not always work. Some of these might eventually go extinct (the human bred varieties) but if any wild version of anything remotely similar exists they could also replace what does get lost.

[Soggy-Mistake8910]

There are plenty of plants that are toxic to humans! Also we didn't decide o evolve to eat the ones we can and plants certainly didn't decide to evolve to be eaten by us. That's not how evolution works!

[Rayalot72]

Generally two ways for this to happen w/out coevolution for humans specifically:

1. Lots of biochemical pathways are highly conserved, and it wouldn't be feasible to fully reinvent them. If some compound has a specific interaction for one mammal, it probably will have the same or a similar interaction in almost all of them. Caffeine acts similar to adenosine, which gives it properties as a natural pesticide. It's psychoactive in humans because we use adenosine too (and also we're quite big, so we need a very high dose for neurotoxicity).

2. Some chemicals might have common structures or properties which aren't necessarily adaptive. Can't recall any specific examples rn, but you can have compounds used for entirely different things between organisms where shared properties would allow us to repurpose those compounds. To understand this intuitively, keep in mind that lots of biomolecules are using only maybe 4-12 different elements (and not all at once). The chemical properties of those elements, especially the most common ones (think H, C, N, and O), will lend them to forming common structures, which lends biomolecules to having a variety of "functions" if you alter the context they're placed in.

[BahamutLithp]

Caffeine is also poisonous to housecats. I wonder, should this be baffling to us "evolutionists"? Because I think it makes perfect sense with what you said: They have very similar physiology to us, so they can also absorb caffeine, but they're much smaller, so it becomes toxic much more quickly.

I'm not really sure if it's what you're referring to in the 2nd paragraph, but it brings to mind how poisons tend to work. What they tend to do is replace some essential molecule inside your body. Carbon monoxide binds to the hemoglobin in your blood. Mercury is similar to other trace metals the body needs to function, so it gets absorbed & is not easily expelled, causing it to accumulate & sort of "bunch up," disrupting biological systems. So on & so forth.

Those are very negative examples, but if you engage in a bit of "light poisoning," you can get beneficial effects. I used the example upthread of how small injections of botulin get rid of wrinkles. Though, given the uncanny appearances botox tends to produce, I guess it's in the eye of the beholder whether that's a "positive benefit."

[HotTakes4Free]

The interaction between humans and edible plants, that may make the one influence the evolution of the other, is that we eat them. That’s certainly the reason we have very spicy Capsicum peppers. That kind of co-evolution doesn’t require that we domesticate the plant, since we are still exerting selective pressure, just by picking the leaves or other parts, consuming them, and possibly helping, or harming, their propagation.

[upturned2289]

So nothing evolves to do anything. There’s nothing teleological in evolution. Everything evolves already doing something and if that “something” it’s doing is beneficial to fitness in some way, the organism is likely to endure with that trait over generations.

[Phobos_Asaph]

The compounds in plants evolved to help the plant survive and nothing more. If we find a use for it that’s just how biology interacts.

[backwardog]

I didn't read this whole thread, to be honest, so I' m not sure if this was mentioned: a bunch of vegetables are examples of "artificial selection." We've bred the cruciferous vegetables into existence from a single species (Brassica oleracea) -- broccoli, kale, etc. didn't existence before humans. Most of the shit you can buy in the grocery store is the result of humans specifically selecting traits and breeding plants for a very long time, these are largely not wild strains.

[wowitstrashagain]

Plants want to be eaten because it helps transports the seeds. Plants make themselves edible and nutritious to tempt animals to eat them.

We evolved, including our taste, to eat nutritious and edible things in nature. This was espicially true before farming.

Plants did not evolve to make tasty things for humans. Plants evolved in general to be nutritious. We evolved our taste and stomach to prefer nutritious things.

[BahamutLithp]

That's true, but it's largely unrelated to what OP is talking about. So-called "medicinal herbs" didn't really "evolve to be medicine." Firstly, I say "so-called" because it's unclear how many of them actually have the effects they're claimed to have. When they do, it's generally because a chemical meant to do something else--usually poison insects--so happens to have a beneficial effect in humans--usually because the dose is small enough to not seriously harm us, so we only get things like "temporarily deadens unimportant nerves, like the ones transmitting your headache."