

How Caffeine Evolved to Help Plants Survive and Help People Wake Up - Bud
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/science/how-caffeine-evolved-to-help-plants-survive-and-help-people-wake-up.html

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ef4
One of the most successful adaptive strategies on earth right now is to be
delicious and/or addictive to humans. It guarantees you'll get planted and
tended at large scale. :-)

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mhurron
It's also caused the extinction of many things. I don't know if that's really
the winning track.

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wyager
>I don't know if that's really the winning track.

It is usually either evolutionary irrelevant or advantageous for one species
to cause the extinction of another. It can help to eliminate resource
competition or predators.

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possibilistic
I think the fitness landscape is too complicated to justify that kind of
assessment. Even with the non-universal qualifier "usually". I think a more
correct statement would be to replace "usually" with "can be", and mention the
possibility of it also being disadventageous or disasterous. At this point the
entire statement becomes somewhat meaningless, though. Maybe it should just be
"too complex to assess without a study per-ecosystem; it depends".

I'm sure someone more familiar with the research can express all of this
mathematically and and confirm of deny the existance of an overall, cross-
cutting model. It may even be common knowledge in evo bio/ecology/etc.

All I can mention on my phone right now is "keystone species", "s curve", and
"wolf/rabbit populations". (or was it elk?) anyway, the latter search term
leads to info on cyclical and highly dynamic ecologies. Check it out.

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runeks
> When insects feed on caffeine-spiked nectar, they get a beneficial buzz:
> they become much more likely to remember the scent of the flower.

This sound very interesting. But has it been reproduced experimentally? I
would be very interested in seeing the results of such an experiment, as I'm
not sure this would happen (at least not if the animals live in the wild).

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a_bonobo
Yes, just last year:

>We provide evidence that plant compounds pharmacologically alter pollinator
behavior by enhancing their memory of reward. Honeybees rewarded with
caffeine, which occurs naturally in nectar of Coffea and Citrus species, were
three times as likely to remember a learned floral scent as were honeybees
rewarded with sucrose alone.

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1202.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1202.full)

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runeks
Thanks for the reference! I can't access the article though, so I'll ask you:
was this experiment conducted in the wild, or in a laboratory?

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icegreentea
Trained bees, so laboratory. On the side, it's always worth googling the paper
in question and poking around a bit. This is at the top of google result for
the paper title:
[http://phys.org/pdf287643238.pdf](http://phys.org/pdf287643238.pdf)

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cesarbs
A better title would be "How Caffeine-producing Plants Evolved to Survive and
Help People Wake Up". Caffeine itself is just a substance, it's hard to say it
evolved by itself.

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x1798DE
I'm not sure there's a meaningful distinction there. Caffeine is the (current)
end product of an evolutionary process. If we went out and killed every
caffeine-producing plant in existence today but continued to synthesize
caffeine ourselves, caffeine would still be a product of evolution and would
still exist, despite the fact that its "reproduction strategy" has changed
from "biosynthesis by plants" to "industrial synthesis by humans", and that
its continued existence is mediated by memes, not genes.

