Mess with your senses

I'm completely, utterly, and totally enthralled with this.
(Mind you, I'm also completely, utterly, and totally enthralled with this, so it's not like the bar's set real high.)

Has anyone tried it? Anyone know whether the berries are for sale in DC? (I found a couple of etailers, but their minimums are pretty high.)

If this story had run anywhere in the vicinity of April, I'd have dismissed it as a gag that wasn't even trying particularly hard. How on earth, I'm wondering, did such a berry evolve? Assuming it's the kind that gets its seeds spread through being eaten, why adopt a strategy that requires the dispersing animal to realize "hey, y'know that thing I ate a while back? It didn't taste that great, but it sure made other things taste good." Why not just evolve the more sure-fire strategy of simply tasting sweet? I mean, the interpretation of delayed causality is pretty tricky -- even humans are notoriously sketchy at it. Why put all your evolutionary eggs in such a high-risk basket?

Unless the berry tastes perfectly fine to the dispersing animals, and its interactions with human tastebuds is just a spandrel. Given the size and diversity of the magnoliophytic division, I suppose I can accept the inevitable coincidence now and then. But still...it boggles the mind (of the easily-boggled, at least).

And really, what a cool teaching tool for driving home the notion of "contingent." Back when I taught evolutionary psychology, it seemed it was always difficult for my students to accept the idea that dispersal foods evolved to taste good to us (while, of course, our tastebuds co-evolved to favor the foods that nourished us). Rather, they wanted to believe, the qualia of sweetness, deliciousness, etc, somehow resided in the food itself. This'd show 'em.

In my occasional ruminations on What's Really, Fundamentally, Wrong With the World (I'm somewhat underemployed at the moment), I often come back to misplaced epistemic certainty as a likely culprit. Not only are we over-reliant on what we erroneously take as prima facie evidence, but, even more dangerously, our bubble of confidence leads us to extend the damaging converse: this isn't my experience; therefore, it isn't your experience. I say: doubt is your friend. As the spinning lady illusion also shows us, your senses can lie. What you bring to an experience -- your embeddedness in wetware, your species-shared evolved heuristics and biases, your time and geography and social standing -- influences what you get out of it; there may not be an objective there there.

And even if there is, it might easily be otherwise. The world is wilder, woollier, and far weirder than you think. Embrace that, and the loss of certainty is initially disconcerting, yes. But what's lost is made up for by a perpetual state of wonder, and a kind of epistemological grace.

Plus, they're berries! And they freak out your tastebuds!