#and yet all of them share long-standing mutualistic relationships with the human communities they live with
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No no no, the last stage should be " ... not what i was looking for but I'll take it"
Menthol and capsaicin-producing plants are massively successful due to their domestication by humans!
Also, we're far from alone in our fondness for recreational poisoning. Many animals will go after psychoactive substances -- it's how we learned about a few of them!
"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.
#response#bio tag#this always bugs me#domestication by humans is winning the evolutionary lottery!#there is nothing else that boosts a species' reproductive success to a remotely similar degree!#that said 'domestication' is a sticky field when you come to more nuanced interspecies relationships#working elephants are not genetically domesticated for example#sugar maples and sweetgrass are not genetically domesticated#dolphins and orcas who team up with human fishers and whalers aren't domesticated#honeyguides are not domesticated! oak savanna as an ecosystem is not domesticated!#and yet all of them share long-standing mutualistic relationships with the human communities they live with#ANYWAY.#evolution has no telos
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