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Too much serendipity

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Re: Too much serendipity

#31

Post by lemax »

perfectritone wrote: post #18

I'm left curious as to why our taste receptors are so attuned to sweetness if high sugar foods weren't historically correlated with being high in energy.

Perhaps because the high sugar foods that occur in nature contain nutrients we don't get elsewhere and help us fight disease. These sugars are also naturally packaged in a way that makes them behave quite unlike added sugars, they don't lead to the same insulin spikes or high blood pressure, and consuming fruits like berries alongside more processed, artificially sweetened foods can even reduce the insulin spikes of those foods.

https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/what-about-all-the-sugar-in-...

Re: Too much serendipity

#32

Post by thfuran »

sudosysgen wrote: post #27
hinkley wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some homebrewers will wax nostalgic about how the human sense of smell/taste can detect almost all of the ways that fermentation can go wrong and make it toxic. But we also keep pushing back earliest dates for precursors to civilization, I start to wonder if maybe there aren't graveyards of people who couldn't distinguish thymol from ethanol and selected themselves out of human history via acute liver failure.

Animals do eat fermented food, through fallen/rotting fruits, so perhaps the thymol sensitivity predates hominids.

Yeah, the ability to detect toxins likely to appear in the food supply seems evolutionarily important.

Re: Too much serendipity

#33

Post by throwaway4aday »

hinkley wrote: post #17
WhatsTheBigIdea wrote: post #7

What a fabulous analysis! The serendipity is remarkably high! I suppose penicillin might be a good addition to the list of powerful compounds discovered by happenstance? Does this mean that innovation is basically a brute force calculation? Humans simply trying permutations until something hits?

How did we ever figure out that aspens and willows have aspirin analogs in their bark? Boredom? Starvation food? Psychedelic mushrooms make sense. You see it, you eat it. Willow bark tea is a whole process.

Back in the day people made tea out of anything they could get their hands on that wasn't outright poisonous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbal_tea#Varieties

Also, if you're in constant pain you'll try all kinds of random stuff to make the pain go away. If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation is its father.

Re: Too much serendipity

#35

Post by neuromanser »

doubled112 wrote: post #24
hinkley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did we ever figure out that aspens and willows have aspirin analogs in their bark? Boredom? Starvation food? Psychedelic mushrooms make sense. You see it, you eat it. Willow bark tea is a whole process.

Makes you wonder about tobacco. Hey, all the bugs that are eating that plant are dying. Let's see what happens if we smoke it.

More like: This plant has no insect parasites, it must be special somehow, let's try and use it in different, increasingly "close approach" ways. I mean, humans must have figured quite early that on average, inhaling smoke of a poisonous plant has a fraction of the effect of chewing the same. Someone gets really sick after chewing some leaves, their family burns the rest of the "crop" and they get high.

Re: Too much serendipity

#36

Post by [deleted] »

thfuran wrote: post #30
johngossman wrote: post #25

I recently learned that anesthesia is the same. Not only has no anesthesia ever been developed except through "serendipity." Not only that, but anesthesia that works for humans also effect a wide range of things including plants and bacteria. But why is an active area of research. There are even speculations that there may be quantum effects involved. Biology and chemistry are insanely complex.

How do you determine whether a plant or bacterium is anesthetized?

[deleted]

Re: Too much serendipity

#37

Post by boston_clone »

thfuran wrote: post #30
johngossman wrote: post #25

I recently learned that anesthesia is the same. Not only has no anesthesia ever been developed except through "serendipity." Not only that, but anesthesia that works for humans also effect a wide range of things including plants and bacteria. But why is an active area of research. There are even speculations that there may be quantum effects involved. Biology and chemistry are insanely complex.

How do you determine whether a plant or bacterium is anesthetized?

I'm really just reposting one of the first few DDG links after inputting your question, but this article covers a few different plants:

https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/12/11/general-anesthesia-work...

Re: Too much serendipity

#38

Post by reaperman »

thfuran wrote: post #30
johngossman wrote: post #25

I recently learned that anesthesia is the same. Not only has no anesthesia ever been developed except through "serendipity." Not only that, but anesthesia that works for humans also effect a wide range of things including plants and bacteria. But why is an active area of research. There are even speculations that there may be quantum effects involved. Biology and chemistry are insanely complex.

How do you determine whether a plant or bacterium is anesthetized?

I don't think they measure if plants/bacterium are anesthetized, but in exposing them to things that cause anesthesia in humans, other potentially unrelated effects are noticed.

Many compounds/mechanisms, especially hormones and neurotransmitters, are widely "re-used" across different biologies for completely different things. They're essentially generic semaphores, and the action caused by raising the semaphore can be basically anything. There's a lot of variance in effect even among different instances of human species, often quite unpredictable, contradictory, and profound.

It's sort of like "hey we already have this testosterone thing, it's currently used to call [function A] but we could refactor that to use it to initiate [function B] instead" (testosterone causes growth in many mammals but inhibits growth in lizards, so female lizards are larger than male lizards)

or "hey we already have the genes to make serotonin for gastrointestinal regulation, but it's not used for anything in the brain. The blood-brain-barrier already prevents somatic serotonin from reaching the brain so we could have a completely different function for it in the brain and regulate gut and brain serotonin in isolation of eachother"

or "hey we have this cholesterol thing that we've been using as a signaling hormone ever since we were on version Plant, maybe we could write a factory that modifies the cholesterol we eat and use it to produce new semaphores like estrogen and testosterone to support a more complex messaging system and handle all the new effects rather than overloading the existing semaphore".

Edit: Probably slightly better to think of them as the coefficients for activation functions, but nothing here is meant to be anywhere remotely close to a direct analogy. Taking any of this literally would be a misreading.

Re: Too much serendipity

#39

Post by jdewerd »

johngossman wrote: post #25

I recently learned that anesthesia is the same. Not only has no anesthesia ever been developed except through "serendipity." Not only that, but anesthesia that works for humans also effect a wide range of things including plants and bacteria. But why is an active area of research. There are even speculations that there may be quantum effects involved. Biology and chemistry are insanely complex.

> there may be quantum effects involved

Quantum Mechanics is why atoms and molecules exist and form bonds. QM is the physics of chemistry. Without QM, chemistry does not happen. The universe would just be a big churning mess of particles and you would never get little lego pieces that snap together according to repeatable rules that, when repeated, form macroscopic substances of innumerable description up to and including life itself.

So QM is no doubt involved, but on this scale it is either a trivial fact or an indication that someone tried to lean on a classical approximation, it broke, and they had to revise it (which arguably says more about the approximation than it says about the underlying behavior).

Apologies for the nitpick. It's a pet peeve of mine that discussions of QM tend to focus so hard on the strange behavior that they forget to mention where QM fits into the bigger picture and leave people with the impression that it only matters under special circumstances when in fact it matters so much that you can hardly have "matter" without it.

------------

Re: anesthetic, a large fraction of simple halocarbon compounds have intense neural effects, so anyone doing halocarbon chemistry would quickly be put on the "scent" even if they weren't tasting everything in the Sigma Aldrich catalog.

Re: Too much serendipity

#40

Post by GolfPopper »

cubefox wrote: post #22

This poses the opposite question: What might we have missed? Maybe there are some reverse-accidents, some significant random discoveries that, due to their randomness, didn't happen.

There was an SF story I read years ago where the core concept was that humanity had somehow "missed" an obvious power-source/FTL drive, which meant that the "solution" to the Drake Equation is that the galaxy is full of intelligent, star-spanning empires that are effectively stuck at a late-1800s tech level (with starships), because getting to there was easy, and doing all the complex 20th century stuff humanity has done is really hard. Hijinks and hilarity ensues when they reach earth.
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