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Complex life may only exist because of millions of years of groundwork by fungi
- erikig 7y agoThe role of fungi in earth's ecology is endlessly fascinating. In addition to laying the groundwork for complex life, there's evidence they helped in the emergence of intelligence and consciousness[1] as well as helping save honeybees[2] [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsif.2014... (pdf link) [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/10/09/446928755/could-a-mushroom-save-the-honeybee https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/10/09/446928755/co...
- sakopov 7y agoIt is indeed. I'd also recommend giving this podcast [1] with Paul Stamets a listen. He's a fairly well-known mycologist who has some very interesting things to say on the topic. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ
- RosanaAnaDana 7y agoStamets is an interesting guy who should never be considered an authority on anything other than the psychedelic experience. He's fun to listen to, but he's a total crank when it comes to actual reproducible science.
- kovek 7y agoI wish people downvoting this comment would contribute to the discussion. Why not contribute?
- robotbikes 7y agoI think in general Paul Stamets is not a scientist per se in the form of writing papers and doing academic research but it is hard to deny his influence as a popularizer of mycology. He also writes about the study and growing of mushrooms and these include the edible not just the psychoactive kind. I know he has done some bioremediation demonstrations but perhaps according to the poster these weren't performed with enough scientific rigor. Not everyone who studies and shares information about something does so from the confines of the traditional academic background and not everyone needs a PhD to be an expert about something so perhaps that is why some people are down voting.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoSounds like he’s an influencer.
- cwkoss 7y agoHe is certainly an authority on mycology. He has found numerous species, identified mushrooms with antiviral activity for the DoD, created a mushroom-based bee-pest treatment, biological system for killing termites without poison, etc.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoInteresting. I've recently gotten in to Paul Stamets and he certainly seems to be involved in a lot of research. He's also literally written the book (multiples, really) on mushroom cultivation. He started his career legally studying psychedelics through a DEA license at his university, but has since contributed to quite a bit of original research according to his own claims. He has said for example that he (in part or in whole, I can't recall) developed the method the DEA still uses for positively identifying psilocybin. It doesn't seem accurate to call him a crank. Indeed when I heard him discuss the "stoned ape theory" he said it makes sense to him, but that it is not provable in his opinion. Doesn't sound like a crank to me.
- L_226 7y agoI acknowledge that this comment is probably low quality, but if you have ever taken magic mushrooms you realise that fungi are definitely linked to the emergence of consciousness.
- andbberger 7y agototally. just the other day when I was tripping balls, I was thinking "Man are these fungi great chemists"
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- nomel 7y agoThis is like claiming that dripping drops of water on a circuit board, and observing that the electronics misbehave, somehow links it to the emergence of circuit design.
- vokep 7y agoYes. If you are a circuit board, getting some water on yourself would be one way to (potentially destructively) learn about what your design actually is. Or fault injection or fuzzing, same idea. By making errors happen, you find out about possible errors that even can happen, and that tells you something about the overall design. Maybe the design cannot be fully determined this way, but a portion can be learned, maybe a portion unreachable by any other means (MRI, neural probes, etc) so research into the mind and consciousness by use of psychedelics does make sense.
- mistermann 7y agoIt surely is in some ways. But in other ways, it sure seems like they have some sort of a special "relationship" (for utter lack of a better term) with consciousness. Out of curiosity, have you tried them before?
- mistermann 7y agoSee also Terence Mckenna's stoned ape theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#%22Stoned_ape%22_theory_of_human_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#%22Stoned_ape%... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnEKoFrx1rI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnEKoFrx1rI Yes it's "a little" out there, but I think it's actually quite plausible.
- ColanR 7y agoSaw that recently...it's cool, but there's no actual evidence that psilocybin has any of the positive evolutionary effects that Mckenna hypothesizes.
- mistermann 7y agoSourcing evidence from prehistoric times is notoriously difficult. What we do know (or think we know, to be more accurate) is often pieced together from archeological finds and correlations of semi-related "facts" from various scientific fields, forming a theoretical model of "how things used to be". We do not know how accurate our models are (each person has their own).
- ColanR 7y ago> low doses of psilocybin improve visual acuity, particularly edge detection, meaning that the presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack hunting primates caused the individuals who were consuming psilocybin mushrooms to be better hunters than those who were not, resulting in an increased food supply and in turn a higher rate of reproductive success. > Then at slightly higher doses, he contended, the mushroom acts to sexually arouse, leading to a higher level of attention, more energy in the organism, and potential erection in the males, rendering it even more evolutionarily beneficial, as it would result in more offspring. > At even higher doses, McKenna proposed that the mushroom would have acted to "dissolve boundaries," promoting community bonding and group sexual activities. > At these higher doses, McKenna also argued that psilocybin would be triggering activity in the "language-forming region of the brain", manifesting as music and visions, thus catalyzing the emergence of language in early hominids by expanding "their arboreally evolved repertoire of troop signals." I'm not saying we don't have evidence for what happened in prehistoric times. As you said, that's hard. But the above is the outline of Mckenna's theory, taken from wikipedia. My point, is that he makes a number of claims as to the effects of psilocybin - see above - and none of those claims of what the drug can do are backed up by evidence. I assume that Mckenna may have been speaking from personal experience, that the drug improves visual acuity and can sexually arouse, but there's no evidence for it.
- empath75 7y agoPlenty of people manage to be conscious without taking mushrooms.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoThe idea is, culture teaches those people how to be conscious, and mushrooms bootstrapped the culture. Not saying it’s correct, but that’s the hypothesis.
- ajuc 7y agoThat's bullshit, people (and other animals) are conscious even without culture.
- lm28469 7y agoPeople without culture? I don't think that's a thing. I also think comparing human level of consciousness to animal level of consciousness is a hard position to defend. Anyway I guess you're missing the original point. What it theorizes is that some mushroom compounds might have had effect on our ancestors brains and helped them develop to what we are now, over long periods of time. A bit like agriculture or writing had a huge impact on our societies, but it's not a on/off switch, it's a very long gradual process. I don't know if there is a lot of evidence supporting it, but it's not news that some drugs can temporarily or permanently reshape parts of our brains.
- philwelch 7y ago> People without culture? I don't think that's a thing. It happens sometimes—feral children who are neglected or abandoned in various ways.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoNo culture would mean: no language, no domiciles, no songs, no clothing. I’m not sure if that person would be more conscious than a dolphin, or a bear.
- benbreen 7y agoCan you explain more how your first link relates to the emergence of consciousness? I skimmed the linked paper and it didn't seem to be drawing any links with human history or evolution. I find both psychedelic drugs and the "hard problem" of consciousness to be deeply interesting, but I've never been persuaded by the Terence McKenna-type arguments that try to connect the two.
- erikig 7y agoAs I understand it, the research aims to show how the network effects of neurons compares between subjects that consumed a placebo vs those that consumed psilocybin from psychedelic fungi.
- akshayB 7y agoEvery time studies are published, we redefine the way in which could be heading towards LUCA. Maybe life on earth existed way earlier then we expected and earth recycles everything over period of time that the traces of origin are gone.
- RosanaAnaDana 7y agoI mean, biogeochemically, we know this to be the case. The earliest evidence of life are not fossils, but changes in atmospheric chemistry recorded in the geologic record. There are some well reasoned arguments that life is utterly common and almost inevitable when conditions are even basically adequate.
- akshayB 7y agoThere are also lot of theories which suggest that life started at multiple places on earth and each branch could have evolved in a very different way. More like a forest rather then single point of origin.
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- stcredzero 7y agoSci-fi plot: Fungi are actually alien artificial life. They were designed as a huge family of microorganisms designed to recreate an alien biosphere. However, when they landed on earth, they encountered something which changed these plans.
- reallydude 7y agoSee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Against_the_Chtorr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Against_the_Chtorr specifically the ontology described during a "pink storm" in A Day for Damnation. A fungal-like substance (the pink fuzz, which looks suspiciously like cottonwood storms south of Seattle) is the catalyst for the rest of the ecology.
- jawilson2 7y agoI LOVED those books in high school! After rereading them a year or so ago, they are pretty indebted to Heinlein and Starship Troopers, but still entertaining. He also goes into preachy libertarian sometimes. This was the guy who wrote the "Trouble with Tribbles" Star Trek episode, which explored some of the same ideas. Also, be prepared that the series was never completed (IIRC he had a son with autism that took time away from writing).
- hyperpallium 7y agoAlso wrote The Flying Sorcerers with Larry Niven, relevant to the top comment, being about kickstarting an alien industrial revolution.
- WorldMaker 7y agoThat's not entirely far from the Fringe-ier parts of Star Trek: Discovery's plot.
- oddsockmachine 7y agoWithout giving away too many spoilers, you might enjoy "The Expanse" books/series
- soDisappointed 7y agoI'm willing to buy into this concept, but the phrasing is way off. The words "may only exist because" is ridiculously presumptive and egocentric, as if to connote that there's some sort of defeat or induced and undeserved subordination to the idea. Like, "oh, how disappointing that mushrroms and yeast get to take all the credit" even though we've known all along that plants and animals weren't the originators of life, according to the heterotroph hypothesis. So, it's more like: "Fungi may have been the spring board to complex life AS WE KNOW IT." It's not some sad revelation. If anything, it's just one more fact in the cryptic mystery of an already strange origin story.
- tehlike 7y agoAnother theory is complex life exists because of viruses, and their ability survive and modify genetic material.
- 013a 7y agoThis is tangentially related: I've had a pet theory for a while (which may not be original, idk) that a possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox Great Filter is literally the existence of huge amounts of Fossil Fuels. It took millions of years of dead biological life on our planet to build up the supplies we have, and the big ol' meteor that hit us some 60 million years ago helped not only kill off a bunch of that life to create oil but set the stage for actual intelligent life. Without lots of oil, we wouldn't have hit the industrial age, we couldn't manufacture renewable energy sources, we couldn't make plastic, we couldn't make rocket fuel, electricity wouldn't be as widespread, basically everything would be different. If oil were substantially less common, its feasible that we'd still live in a 1800s-esque society with some form of civilization development, but would be have radio? Certainly not space travel. Point being: M-class planets might be pretty common in the universe, maybe cellular and even multicellular life is less common, maybe intelligent/sentient live is even less common, maybe civilization is even less common. And we've only really "existed" for a few tens of thousand years in the grand scheme of billions of years, those years littered with possible extinction-like events both man-made and natural. Combine all of those probabilities together, with the reality that we may have just "missed" another species on the timeline of the universe, and it seems more likely than not that we're alone in this galaxy. Which is actually pretty awesome if you think about it. The whole playground is our's; let's go take it.
- poopchute 7y agoI think a civilization could make a pretty good go at things without fossil fuels. The 2 big use cases for fossil fuel are the temperature of the heat itself (for things like smelting), but also how simple it is to make a steam engine with energy dense fuels (cars/trains/planes/electricity). Temperature wise, a lot of metals can be smelted with clever oven design using wood/charcoal (though another planet wont have exactly wood, obviously). Energy wise, wind mills and water wheels have been in use for thousands of years, and after the discovery of electricity, its reasonably simple to turn that mechanical energy into electricity (using wood-smelted metals).
- Chris_Chambers 7y agoPetroleum is constantly regenerated by the mantle splashing against the crust. That’s why depleted reservoirs are always full again ten years later. Please stop spreading this “fossil fuel” conspiracy theory.