The impossible predicament of the death newts • Hacker News Board

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#101

Post by amanaplanacanal » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 7:33 PM UTC

sbierwagen wrote: post #18

ryanblakeley wrote: post #9

I once took a group of young people foraging for mushrooms in the Willamette valley on a farm that had loads of these newts. I warned every body not to touch them. After preparing dinner, one girl got very ill, as did I, while other people who ate the dinner were fine. I was so worried I'd mis-identified some mushrooms. But turns out she had handled one of these newts and the bacteria had transferred to the mushrooms…

Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.

Eating plants at random must be more dangerous than eating mushrooms. I have heard that there are far more poisonous plants than fungi, and greens have almost no calories.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#102

Post by amanaplanacanal » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 7:36 PM UTC

tekla wrote: post #69

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, optimizing around cost per calorie is, at least in most places in the US, a great way to have horrible health and die an early death.

No its not. This is such a weird talking point completely divorced from reality. It's the complete opposite.

That's what I was thinking. Rice and beans are cheap cheap cheap.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#103

Post by skipants » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 8:08 PM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #5

> Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it. [..] We don’t know, but we’re pretty sure there must be something. We know that garter snakes outside of the Pacific Northwest are much less resistant to tetrodotoxin. They’ll drop dead from doses that their Oregon cousins s…

Yes! Thank you! I’m barely knowledgable when it comes to biology and I still get annoyed when evolution is framed as cause-and-effect.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#104

Post by gptacek » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 8:16 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #99

aqme28 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a nonzero number of animals and people die of tetrodoxin poisoning, so there is some pressure. Therefore if it were cheap and easy enough, it’s likely we all would have evolved it. That cheapness threshold might just be incredibly high.

If it is rare enough it probably doesn't exert much selection pressure. Has anybody modeled what percent of a population has to die from something for the protective gene to become widespread?

If you're willing to abstract a bit from populations of animals to populations of bacteria, there is the minimum selective concentration (MSC), which is the smallest amount of antibiotic you can add to the growth medium and detect antibiotic resistant bacteria competing out non-antibiotic-resistant bacteria:

https://revive.gardp.org/resource/minimal-selective-concentr...

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#105

Post by k__ » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

I recently learned, there is a dangerous plant in many gardens around the US. If you stand under it for more than 10minutes, you're pretty much dead.

Turns out, it's the water-lily.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#106

Post by mattigames » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 8:38 PM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #5

> Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it. [..] We don’t know, but we’re pretty sure there must be something. We know that garter snakes outside of the Pacific Northwest are much less resistant to tetrodotoxin. They’ll drop dead from doses that their Oregon cousins s…

Survivorship bias, you perceive it doesn't come with a cost, but perhaps some species that were exposed to it died from it because they failed to adapt because it does come with a cost they couldn't pay, so they went extinct, like it's wildly common.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#107

Post by mattigames » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC

odyssey7 wrote: post #59

arp242 wrote: post #5

> Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it. [..] We don’t know, but we’re pretty sure there must be something. We know that garter snakes outside of the Pacific Northwest are much less resistant to tetrodotoxin. They’ll drop dead from doses that their Oregon cousins s…

That claim jumped out to me as well. Evolution is supply and demand, cost and benefit, capacity and constraints, none of it balanced by anything apart from luck.

This is categorically false, we know evolving bigger brains required us to reduce our muscle mass compared to other primates, for the energy budget required to create such brains.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#108

Post by CaffeineLD50 » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 8:51 PM UTC

istjohn wrote: post #91

CaffeineLD50 wrote: post #75

I'm pretty sure my degoogled Murena /e/ OS pixel 5 won't have this problem.

Wrong thread -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193198

Indeed

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#109

Post by pegasus » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 9:01 PM UTC

mekoka wrote: post #94

arp242 wrote: post #5

> Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it. [..] We don’t know, but we’re pretty sure there must be something. We know that garter snakes outside of the Pacific Northwest are much less resistant to tetrodotoxin. They’ll drop dead from doses that their Oregon cousins s…

I think it might be more useful to look at the author's claim from the other side of the lense. We do carry around barely useful traits, like resistance to toxins that we seldom come in contact with. We can assume that carrying such traits is cheap. If resistance to tetrodotoxin was one such cheap trait, it might have been more prevalent, but it's not so, it could be inferred that it's expensive. Or at least, not che…

That resistance to toxins we don't encounter often enough to constitute selective pressure, we carry around only if it's the accidental byproduct of another selected-for trait. Otherwise entropy would take care of it, sooner or later. Parent is right, evolution doesn't pay an annual subscription fee for some service which was useful in the past and might come in handy in the future.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#110

Post by pegasus » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

mattigames wrote: post #107

odyssey7 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That claim jumped out to me as well. Evolution is supply and demand, cost and benefit, capacity and constraints, none of it balanced by anything apart from luck.

This is categorically false, we know evolving bigger brains required us to reduce our muscle mass compared to other primates, for the energy budget required to create such brains.

And those adorable koalas made the opposite bet, shrinking brain size in order to conserve energy so as to be able to carve a niche no other mammal cared for: https://youtu.be/dXUp_JMQjvg