Tim Tyler  wrote in
news:cgnku0$l9n$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> William Morse  wrote or quoted:
>> "John Edser"  wrote in
>> > William Morse  wrote:
> 
>> >> I have nothing but praise for anything associated with Mexican
>> >> food (we routinely add jalapenos to almost everything we cook),
>> >> but I thought some of the credit for developing the compounds that
>> >> make hot peppers hot has to go to natural selection by pepper
>> >> plants for seed dispersal by birds rather than mammals - birds
>> >> don't find the compounds irritating while mammals do.
>> > 
>> > JE:-
>> > If mammals find hot peppers irritating
>> > then surely this indicates, from an
>> > evolutionary nutritional perspective ,
>> > that mammals should not eat them?
>> 
>> No, it only indicates that mammals shouldn't rub their eyes - or
>> other sensitive bodyily parts - after handling them :-). But
>> seriously, monarch butterflies have adapted to eat the toxic
>> milkweed, and the result has been beneficial to the monarch. As
>> opposed to the compounds in milkweed, capsaicinoids are not
>> particularly toxic, and they help keep food from spoiling. 
>>
>> So from a nutritional perspective, mammals should learn to 
>> tolerate the irritant effect in order to benefit from the
>> preservative effect - which is exactly what numerous peoples in lower
>> latitudes have done, judging from Ethiopian, Thai and southern Indian
>> cuisines along with Mexican.
> 
> Mammals generally avoid eating chilies.
> 
> The life/dinner priniciple may have given the chilies the upper hand 
> on this one:
> 
> Since the viability of chile seeds are destroyed in mammal digestive 
> tracts, the fruit are fighting for their lives - while the mammals are
> only fighting for their dinners.
> 
> Humans are a different matter - of course.  These days the chile plant
> is grown as a domesticated crop - and may be significantly more
> palatable to man than its ancestors were.

A very good point regarding the life/dinner principle. With regard to 
recent use by humans, since chiles are native to south america all the 
other cuisines that have adopted them have done so in the last 500 years, 
although apparently Szechuan cuisine previously used a species related to 
black pepper that has similar effects. This is obviously a statement about 
the cultural flexibility of humans, reinforcing your point about humans 
being a different matter. However, I'm not so sure about the increase in 
palatability with cultivation - habanero's are extremely hot, and they are 
AFAIK products of cultivation.

But in any case my original point was only that plants produce many 
substances to make themselves irritating or attractive to mammals.I do not 
think that it is necessarily in the evolutionary interest of mammals to go 
along with the plants "wishes" in the matter.

Yours,

Bill Morse
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