Episode 12- Food Aversions and Prehistoric Drug Use

In this episode I talk about the age old battle between animals that want to eat plants and plants that don't want to be eaten. One of the defenses that plants use is to create toxins that poison the animals. This is why so many plants are a source of medicines and drugs that affect just about every physiological process in the body of animals. One of the defenses of animals is to rapidly detect a poisonous plant by the taste. They do this by a rapid and specialized form of conditioning called Conditioned Taste Aversion. This means that our animal ancestors will have been exposed to plant-based neurotoxins and alcohol for many millions of years. The consequences of this exposure are discussed and can explain why humans are vulnerable to drugs of abuse, and why this has only been a problem for the last 10,000 years. The availability of so many hallucinogenic and empathogenic drugs can explain why religions exist.