Noah Whiteman shines light on the poisons found in every day items and the link between poison and evolution
By
Poisons are an integral part of our everyday lives. We keep them in our spice racks and bathroom cabinets, and we drink them in the morning to wake us up and at night to help us sleep. They may not be toxic to us in the doses usually consumed, but nevertheless, as writer and evolutionary biologist Noah Whiteman reveals in Most Delicious Poison, the chemicals found in ordinary medicines and spices have had a much more significant impact on evolution than we might imagine. Far from a sideshow, he writes, ‘they are the main event, and we’ve unwittingly stolen them from a war raging all around us.’
That war, the ‘war of nature’, as Charles Darwin called it, is the constant struggle between predator and prey – whether plant, fungus, insect or mammal – and the innovative chemical weapons that different species have developed in order to survive and reproduce.
Most Delicious Poison explores the origins of these toxins, their original purpose and how we’ve adopted them for our own uses. Take caffeine, present in small doses in the floral nectar of citrus species, which has been found to boost the memory of pollinating honeybees, encouraging them to return to the plant. In humans, caffeine doesn’t just perk us up; scientific studies have discovered it can even help to extend our lives. In large doses, however, it can kill us. ‘There is nothing inherently healthy about natural products,’ Whiteman cautions. Our use of toxins must ‘walk along a knife’s edge,’ says Whiteman, whose own experience of addiction (his father died of alcohol abuse disorder) is a continuous thread throughout the book.
Most Delicious Poison is a compelling and personal story, balanced by Whiteman’s biological expertise, as he wades – sometimes a little deeply for the casual reader – into the science behind nature’s poisons.
