Aug 24, 2017 10:48 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ic/537789/
EXCERPT: [...] Ironically, he became a mycologist—an aficionado of fungi. And he eventually came to study the very mushrooms that he had once experienced, precisely because so few others had. “I realized how pitifully little we still knew about the genetics and ecology of such a historically significant substance,” he says.
Why, for example, do mushrooms make a hallucinogen at all? It’s certainly not for our benefit: These mushrooms have been around since long before people existed. So why did they evolve the ability to make psilocybin in the first place?
And why do such distantly related fungi make psilocybin? Around 200 species do so, but they aren’t nestled within the same part of the fungal family tree. Instead, they’re scattered around it, and each one has close relatives that aren’t hallucinogenic. “You have some little brown mushrooms, little white mushrooms ... you even have a lichen,” Slot says. “And you’re talking tens of millions of years of divergence between those groups.”
It’s possible that these mushrooms evolved the ability to make psilocybin independently. It could be that all mushrooms once did so, and most of them have lost that skill. But Slot thought that neither explanation was likely. Instead, he suspected that the genes for making psilocybin had jumped between different species....
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EXCERPT: [...] Ironically, he became a mycologist—an aficionado of fungi. And he eventually came to study the very mushrooms that he had once experienced, precisely because so few others had. “I realized how pitifully little we still knew about the genetics and ecology of such a historically significant substance,” he says.
Why, for example, do mushrooms make a hallucinogen at all? It’s certainly not for our benefit: These mushrooms have been around since long before people existed. So why did they evolve the ability to make psilocybin in the first place?
And why do such distantly related fungi make psilocybin? Around 200 species do so, but they aren’t nestled within the same part of the fungal family tree. Instead, they’re scattered around it, and each one has close relatives that aren’t hallucinogenic. “You have some little brown mushrooms, little white mushrooms ... you even have a lichen,” Slot says. “And you’re talking tens of millions of years of divergence between those groups.”
It’s possible that these mushrooms evolved the ability to make psilocybin independently. It could be that all mushrooms once did so, and most of them have lost that skill. But Slot thought that neither explanation was likely. Instead, he suspected that the genes for making psilocybin had jumped between different species....
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