@WashYourHands - I don't think anyone but the daftest of hippies seriously suggests that psilocybin can reconfigure DNA. As I understand it, Stoned Ape posits that some, but not all, of our hominid ancestors had a genetic predisposition to somehow benefiting from the effects of psychoactive plants and fungi. I mean benefiting in the sense of it conferring some concrete advantage to survival or reproduction. Then this predisposition would have been positively selected for.
Whatever this advantage was, it must have been pretty substantial to outweigh the fact that a proto-person stumbling around prehistoric Africa in an ecstatic trance would have been easy meat for a leopard or crocodile. You can say that that's rather a tall tale, but it's somewhat less silly than mushrooms directly genetically engineering humans.
Eh! That's a briilliant idea!Proof. Conjecture is fun, don’t get me wrong, but McKenna also thought he could pull an geometric object out from a psychedelic experience into a post-trip world. An actual physical birth across dimensions. And people laugh at the Dead.
Proof is overrated though, a thing can be true without being provable, isnt it?Proof. Conjecture is fun, don’t get me wrong, but McKenna also thought he could pull an geometric object out from a psychedelic experience into a post-trip world. An actual physical birth across dimensions. And people laugh at the Dead.
what evidence could exist?I’m not ruling out mushrooms influencing human systems or individuals, or ritual use across millennia, but evidence isn’t there yet of a direct influence on brain evolution or genetics. It’s a fairly focused point.
i think this goes for most of science tbh. distant past, distant cosmos, very big or small things, science is attenuated beyond usefulness into guesswork in every directionNone. That's the great thing about the distant past. You can make up any old nonsense. It's the broadest canvas for the imagination to work on, well, that and the distant future