Interrupting your election stress scrolling with this exciting newsâŚ
The North American paperback edition of Most Delicious Poison just shipped to a bookstore near you and will be in stores on November 18!
It printed beautifully thanks to my fabulous publisher Little, Brown & Co.
A deadly secret lurks within our kitchens, medicine cabinets and gardens. Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin) and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But what is the reason plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse them? Based on cutting-edge science in the fields of evolution, chemistry, and neuroscience, Most Delicious Poison is the first book to reveal the origins of plant and fungal toxins, the mechanisms animals have evolved to overcome them, and how a co-evolutionary arms race made its way into the human experience. This perpetual chemical war not only drove the diversification of life on Earth, but is also intimately tied to our own successes and failures as a species.
Antagonistic coevolution of plants and insects is hypothesized to promote biological diversity. This study shows convergent evolution of a gene that encodes the GABA receptor, a target of plant toxins, in herbivorous insects and their predators. It further demonstrates that the evolution of resistant GABA receptors is associated with insect diversification.
A deadly secret lurks within our kitchens, medicine cabinets and gardens. Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin) and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But what is the reason plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse them? Based on cutting-edge science in the fields of evolution, chemistry, and neuroscience, Most Delicious Poison is the first book to reveal the origins of plant and fungal toxins, the mechanisms animals have evolved to overcome them, and how a co-evolutionary arms race made its way into the human experience. This perpetual chemical war not only drove the diversification of life on Earth, but is also intimately tied to our own successes and failures as a species.
Carl Zimmer
