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The impossible predicament of the death newts

crookedtimber.org

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Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#111

Post by pegasus »

skipants wrote: post #103
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.

No need to be annoyed. I think if you look deeper, you might find that, in fact, all occurrences of what we call cause and effect are of a similar nature.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#112

Post by a_shoeboy »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #42
mock-possum wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on - Making cost benefit analysis of foraging and eating wild mushrooms into a matter of calories is wild. The calorific value of a meal is one of the least important aspects - you might as well complain that the mushrooms don’t come in sufficiently varied colours to make it worthwhile. It’s not about the calories. It’s about the experience - the taste, the texture, the satisfaction of knowing you did it your…

Yeah, when I read the comment about calories I thought "This is a prime example when engineers only think about numbers and completely miss the forest for the trees (err, mushrooms)" Also, for many mushrooms, the risk of consuming a toxic variety is extremely low if you know what you're doing. People love to bring up examples of "But the head of the Mycological Society of XYZ died of misidentified mushrooms!!", but a…

A high percentage of fatal poisonings in the US have been Southeast Asian immigrants because, in the button stage, the North American death cap looks nearly identical to the paddy straw mushroom they know from home.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#113

Post by BurningFrog »

isk517 wrote: post #34
crazygringo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories. All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in. I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- yo…

Mushrooms add to the umami flavour, before salt was easily accessible this was probably your best bet for easy flavour enhansement

Salt has always been freely available from the ocean, which I believe most people lived pretty close to.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#114

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #100
lithocarpus wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile 48 million Americans get some kind of food poisoning each year. Eating food is dangerous! I've eaten many hundreds of pounds of wild mushrooms in the last eight years and have not had any food poisoning at all.

To be honest, I will probably still pass. Mushrooms kinda freak me out on a biological level anyways. What is crazy to me is how people find certain things scary or risky but they'll literally strap themselves inside a metal box on wheels that has uses a controlled explosion produced with highly carcinogenic toxic chemicals, that has hundreds of parts that can fail, it can slam into the other contraption next you tea…

I can't remember who said it originally, but it amuses me to no end that the only reason our society works as well as it does is a mutual agreement to follow some lines and not play bumper cars

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#115

Post by mekoka »

pegasus wrote: post #109
mekoka wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may just be trying to disagree with the author for sport.

> we carry around only...

Not true. We can carry resistance to some ancestral pressure which isn't part of the current environment.

> sooner or later...

Yes, sooner when it's costly, later when it's less so, through normal evolutionary pressure (entropy and all).

The point is, most species at time T do carry traits that aren't that useful to them anymore. The costlier ones yield enough negative fitness points in evolutionary game theory to rid the gene pool of them quicker. It brings us right back to the author's original argument.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#116

Post by diggan »

soperj wrote: post #53
sbierwagen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly it's not hours of study. You identify the one mushroom that you're going foraging for, and then you need to know the ones that look like it so that you don't get those by mistake. It's pretty simple if you know what you're doing. Ie: Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs.

> Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs

I'm not sure that's true, I know that we had Cantharellus cibarius ("golden chanterelle") growing up everywhere in the woods, but I don't think the Douglas fir even exists there, never heard that name before. The forest was mostly oak I think.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#117

Post by Retric »

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…

It’s not some binary thing but degrees of adaptation.

People can handle significantly more of a wide range of plant toxins like theobromine and caffeine (both found in chocolate) which harm more pure predators like dogs in very low doses, but where rare for out imitate ancestors.

Cattle, deer etc however can handle many of those at much higher doses.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#118

Post by bsder »

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…

> An ancestor lost the trait for vitamin C synthesis by chance, and because these primates were living in trees eating lots of fruit with vitamin C, evolution simply didn't notice. There is no disadvantage to being able to synthesise vitamin C, and no advantage in dropping the trait.

The fact that guinea pigs, fruit bats, and passerines (almost half of all bird species!) also have a mutated GULO gene suggests that there is in fact some pressure to get rid of it as soon as it is bioavailable from diet.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#119

Post by bsder »

skipants wrote: post #103
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.

Well, there is some "cause-and-effect" in evolution.

Whenever a species winds up isolated in a cave, it loses eyesight really quickly in evolutionary terms because making and maintaining an eye is so metabolically expensive. So, while the mutations are random, any of them that can save the energy of developing vision get selected for very quickly.

So, even though the mutations are random, it really looks like "cause-and-effect" from the outside: get isolated in cave->lose vision; get exposed to outside light again->regain vision.

By the same token, changes that aren't very expensive metabolically will have very weak "cause-and-effect" because there is no particular pressure to carry the mutations forward or clean them up.

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