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This is another case of a huge fallacy humans seem endlessly afflicted with: The Root Cause Fallacy.

You are assuming there is but one cause for development and/or loss of resistance.

There may not be much pressure to develop resistance to tetrodotoxin for most species. Simultaneously there might be a higher metabolic cost to retaining it for some species but not for others. It is also possible that resistance with low cost is very rarely lost which is why we carry resistance to toxins we don't often see but population bottlenecks in ancestral lines can cause loss of a trait to propagate - even by accident. And much like Vitamin C loss if it doesn't matter the loss sticks. We should not forget that there are multiple resistance mechanisms as well: an immune system generally primed to fight certain common causes of mortality can, entirely by accident, also be primed to recognize and destroy certain proteins conferring resistance to some toxins and not others.

I have barely scratched the surface above. The random walk of evolution and its constant hoarding tendencies should make everyone skeptical simplistic mechanisms of action as well as "just so" explanations of evolutionary history.

FWIW most things are multi-causal. I previously made the same argument about house prices. People who claim it is caused by foreign money, low interest rates, restrictive zoning, etc all want their pet theory to be The One True Reason. In reality the market is complex and many of the proposed causes are merely contributing factors.

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.

> like resistance to toxins that we seldom come in contact with.

Is that because resistance to those toxins was strongly selected for in humans, or because the source of those toxins did not strongly select for effectiveness in humans?

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.

You wildly misunderstood the topic being discussed and user above you is correct.

I omitted some bits from the quote for brevity and HN's faux-quoting sucks, but that's not really the type of "cost" the article is talking about: "maybe they’re suffering from much more subtle neurological effects, like being prone to insomnia or hallucinations or sexual dysfunction. Or maybe they’re just a bit dim."

Agreed, it's just shorthand/abstraction. Just like my for-loop in python doesn't actually mean my computer speaks Python

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.

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?

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.

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.

Eh, enzyme mutations leading to inactivity aren't uncommon. It could just be drift when enough vitamin C is available.

There is no reason for it to spread, but also no reason for it not to. Presumably there was another (completely unrelated) trait, and it happened to spread because of that.

> There should instead be a mixture of those who can and those who can’t synthesize vitamin C.

Probably was for a long time. All of this happened about 60 millions years ago. It's been a while.

It's more likely that a mutation in the gene/pathway arose multiple times independently, instead of one spreading through the population.

The joke here is that: If you stand under a water lily for 10 minutes, you are underwater for 10 minutes

> Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison.

That's got to be an extremely weak effect. No snake gets an individual benefit from eating the newts. They get a collective benefit, that predators recognize the species as poisonous, in which all snakes, poisonous and delicious alike, share equally.

The problem is large enough that actually-poisonous animals routinely have delicious mimics of entirely different species who free-ride off of the work the originals do to be poisonous.

You can't explain why snakes apparently need to avoid sending a dishonest signal with a theory that predicts that mimics don't exist.

I can understand why. You rarely see newts mentioned, even though they’re biologically fascinating. Maybe it’s just because people mistake them for another kind of lizard.

> It's great in german - 3 syllables for 3 letters, but english/french, it's NINE syllables for 3 letters.

Kind of absurd to use multiple syllables for a single letter if you think about it.

> I always thought it should have been web.domain.org.

It should have just been "domain.org" - the web part is already specified in the protocol. And if you are concerned about domains only having a single IP that could have been (and for many protocols has been) solved with SRV records.

few more generations of handling these lil friends and maybe we can get aposematic coloring in humans

Maybe we’re already in the afterlife. How would we know any different, really? Bested by newts

I'm not aware of other newt species in their range that look similar.

I do think the article plays up their toxicity some. There's only one reported human fatality I could find, from some dipshit who ate one on a dare. If you handle them gently and don't stuff your entire hand in your mouth immediately after, I suspect you're fine.

Intraguild killing (such as lions killing leopards or cheetahs) has been described in multiple species.

Perhaps interesting; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34816428/ (Still need to read it)

Cats kill things for I guess what you'd call fun, although it is food related as they hone their skills for when they may need them.

Territorial animals will kill to protect their turf. A successful species could conceivably kill off a less successful one by conquering all its territory.

In theory, you're killing a species that competes with your preferred prey species for habitat or food, which could mean more abundant food for you and your kin in the future.

I am not aware of any species besides humans that do this, though.

Wolves and other predators were hunted to near extinction in North America on this rationale. My mother in law kills all spiders and snakes she can on sight.

Indeed

Where I live mushrooms are by far the most abundant wild food. It's good exercise, very enjoyable "work", and they taste really really good with a huge variety of flavors.

Leafy greens also have very low calories per pound. We eat them for the nutrients not for the calories. Because of mushrooms and wild greens, I buy very little vegetables, all I need is relatively cheap (per calorie) foods to go with the wild stuff.

There is also risk of food poisoning with food from restaurants or the store.. not to mention the chronic poisoning of eating food grown with excessive pesticides etc.

For the most part the abundant edible mushrooms look very different from the dangerous ones. But yes you do need to know ID thoroughly if you go for certain species.

That said not everyone lives where edible mushrooms are abundant, I'm not trying to suggest everyone should do it.

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 -- you got a new flavor!

Acccording to America's poisen center these are the numbers:

Calls to poisen control concerning mushrooms: 8,294 Of those calls, 4862 were of unknown origin, only like 3-400 are confirmed dangerous wild grown mushrooms, 2k+ are psylocibin. 3-400 is probably <1% of the amount of people who forage, so its a lot safer than driving a car I'm guessing.

(This was a quick scan)

https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/dPhtQdu6eCQnIQ5R.pdf [page 174-175]

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.

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 yourself.

You can say that to any mildly dangerous hobby

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.

do you only eat the food with the highest calories:risk ratio?

Meh, there are a couple of mushrooms that are super easy to identify with no risk of confusing them with anaything dangerous (at least where I live). Stick to those and you're fine. Also, they are super tasty ;)

They’re also an acquired taste, which makes it even more absurd.

Well then, what do you think about eating fugu?

Sorry but skill issue.

Same! I even kept a couple of them in a terrarium. And, my dad was a PhD in zoology, so it wasn't like I lacked access to expert advice. It was a "they have toxins on their skin, so... Eh, maybe wash your hands a bit", not "wash your hands or the whole family dies" level of concern.

Makes me wonder if a) these toxicity stories are exaggerated, b) it's really regionally specific, c) toxicity has radically increased in the past ~40 years since I was playing with newts, or d) we got dumb lucky.

I loved this article. I didn't know anything about the newt / snake interaction; I wonder if my dad did.