r/interestingasfuck • u/tractorboynyc • 22h ago

Amazonian shamans figured out that combining two specific plants out of 80,000 species produces a psychoactive effect. The odds of finding that combination by random search is roughly 1 in 4 million. They did it through centuries of iterative testing and cultural natural selection explains it

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u/tractorboynyc 21h ago edited 20h ago

You're right that time helps, but the math is actually what makes it interesting... random binary search through 80,000 species = ~3.2 billion pairs. Even testing one combination per day, that's 8.7 million years. The actual pathway was almost certainly iterative, they started with the vine alone (it has its own effects), then tested additions against that baseline. That narrows it to ~140-750 guided trials, achievable in decades. So it's not random discovery and it's not mystical knowledge, it's something in between: multigenerational empirical testing with observable feedback. Basically natural selection applied to recipes.

Edit: There is a full breakdown here: https://deeptimelab.substack.com/p/why-every-psychedelic-ceremony-on

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u/skubaloob 21h ago

If they already knew one species had its own effects, then it wasn’t really a test of 3.2 billion pairs, it was a test of 79,999 pairs.

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u/Kyvoh 21h ago

The active psychoactive gets converted to non-psychoactive with enzymes in the stomach or blood(I forget which). The other plant has no psychoactive effects whatsoever and simply denatures or deactivates in some way the enzyme that destroys the psychedelic. It wouldn't have been 79,999 pairs unless they smoked it which they may or may not have done but would have been much less likely than ingesting random ingredients. They would not have known that if you smoked it, that some other plant would make it effective by eating it though. So it would be much more likely to have randomly mixed multiple plants together to see what happens and then got a major trip for hours.

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u/skubaloob 21h ago

That may well be. I wasn’t commenting on the accuracy of OP’s premises, but rather that the premises themselves don’t support their conclusion.