Why did the human body develop the ability to engage with cannabinoids? I’ve heard people postulating that we’re practically build to get high, as a justification for cannabis usage, but I can’t really believe it would be the main cause for this specific natural selection. I mean; from a darwinian perspective it doesn’t really make sense – how would getting high be survival of the fittest? Also, there exist other cannabinoids than THC, so what is the effect of these, and how present are they in our daily lives and what are the effect of these?
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In terms of evolving along selection pressures, it actually runs in the opposite direction. Most plants that have funky chemicals in them that don’t really do much for the plant in its internal life processes, evolved to produce those chemicals as a form of defence. Plants can’t really run away or physically fight back, so they have to use static defences, if at all.
Tobacco evolved to produce nicotine in its tissues to poison insects that want to eat it. Capsaicin-bearing plants (hot chilies, etc.) evolved those substances to ensure that only birds, which aren’t affected by the “heat”, would eat their fruit and spread their seeds. Mammals just grind them up and destroy them. Cannabis likely evolved the cannabinoid compounds because of a similar effect.
We big-brained humans, on the other hand, with our large bodies and the ability to eat almost anything, encountered these substances and liked the effects. So, we keep doing it, regardless of whether it was in the plants’ interests or not. Just happenstance that some plants defences were something we liked the effect of.
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