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.
-- 
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 |im |yler  http://timtyler.org/  tim{at}tt1lock.org  Remove lock to reply.
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