Author: Matthew Davis / Source: Big Think
- Fungi species that produce psilocybin—the main hallucinogenic ingredient in “magic” mushrooms—aren’t closely related to one another.
- Researchers have discovered that the way these fungi independently gained the ability to produce psilocybin is because of horizontal gene transfer.
- Based on how uncommon horizontal gene transfer is in mushroom-producing fungi and the types of fungi that produce psilocybin, it seems likely that the hallucinogenic chemical is meant to scramble the brains of insects competing with fungi for food.
Throughout our history, human beings have demonstrated a powerful and committed love of tinkering with our brain chemistry. We drink the waste of sugar-eating bacteria, smoke the leaves of garden-variety weeds, and munch on mushrooms whose chemicals give us such a strange experience we have to call it magic. We’ve been doing this for thousands and thousands of years, too: Cave paintings of certain mushroom species suggested that our ancestors liked to turn on, tune in, and drop out as well.
But the very fact that magic mushrooms exist and that their main psychoactive ingredient—psilocybin—can provide such a powerful experience is odd. Nearly all of the qualities of the various species of life on Earth have some kind of functionality. Deer don’t have antlers because they’re pretty; they’re there for mating displays. Cheetahs don’t run fast because they’re big fans of cardio exercise; its their strategy for catching prey. Magic mushrooms don’t produce psilocybin because it makes human beings hallucinate; it’s there for a reason.
What makes psilocybin so unusual?
Photo by Егор Камелев on Unsplash
The researchers believe that psilocybin production evolved to disorient insects that would otherwise compete with the fungi for food or consume the fungi themselves.
New research in the journal Evolution Letters has uncovered evidence for the functional purpose of psilocybin in fungi. It’s there to screw with insects; specifically, those insects that wouldn’t mind chowing down on a fungi’s mushroom or on the food that fungi themselves like to eat—dung and wood.
Part of what’s made it so difficult to pin down the purpose of psilocybin in mushrooms is that psilocybin-producing mushrooms are mostly not related to one another. It doesn’t appear as though a…
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