Ideas sometimes stew inside me for a while. Some of the debate about Behe and “Intelligent Design” got me thinking.
It’s surprising how rarely Creationsists come up with original ideas to prove their case. Usually they parrot old and debunked arguments.
I’m surprised I haven’t heard anyone use the medicinal properties of herbs as an argument.
Some plants have psychoactive chemicals in them. It seems that something like nicotine offers no advantage to your basic tobacco plant. It simply manufactures a chemical that has pleasant and addictive effects to humans.
Extracts of various plants have been found to be effective against various ailments. What benefit does manufacturing these drugs give the plant?
If it’s random and coincidental, why do we bother searching out the medicinal properties of plants? Wouldn’t we just as likely find the cure for cancer by mixing chemicals randomly and seeing what happens?
What is the mechanism or the reasoning behind the beneficial medicinal properties of plants, and what are they getting out of it?
How come the intelligent designers haven’t argued this? Not that I believe it proves or suggests anything supernatural, but it seems a slightly better argument than blood clot factors and such.
Would I be guessing correctly that most of the medicinal properties of plants are by-products of their defense mechanisms? That is they evolve a complex of various chemicals that in concert provide a deterrent or poisonous effect on certain predators, but when isolated singly may have medicinal properties?
in the case of tobacco, I think you’re right. IIRC, I heard somewhere that nicotine is a toxin that is used for defense against insects. I could be wrong, for as you see I have no cites…
Yeah, this is definately a good insecticide. A farmer grandfather of mine would collect tobacco scraps, boil them down, and use it in a spray after filtering. It worked quite well.
Although I
Possibly, instead of an argument for creationism, plants manufacturing chemicals that are pleasant or useful to humans might be an argument for evolution.
Something like: “Create pleasant/useful chemicals and youur seeds get propagated,”
Among some herbal medicine adherents, there is a version of the “intelligent design” argument at work. The “whole herb” theory suggests that herbal drugs work better when you prepare a concoction from the whole herb, as opposed to a drug company making a standardized product containing only the active principle. It’s the idea that God created the plant to help mankind, and there is some mysterious interaction among its many parts that makes the whole herb work best.
Unfortunately for this concept, many herbs contain both useful and toxic principles (comfrey is one example - take it internally and it can wreck your liver). And if “intelligent design” was behind the creation of Colchicum and Digitalis, how come the drugs they contain (colchicine for gout, digitalis for strengthening the heart) are so toxic that they can cause dangerous and even fatal side effects if not used very carefully? Wouldn’t “intelligent design” have come up with something milder?
And the God squadders have to be careful when dealing with herbs like cannabis, peyote, Salvia divinorum etc.
Getting high is not in the eternal plan.
As a side note, nicotine has been sold commercially as an effective insecticide and has been praised for breaking down quickly in the environment. The downside is that effective concentrations are very toxic to humans at the time of use. Oops.
[pardon the slight hijack]
Why would a “natural” cure be safer? Because it’s natural, instead of a man-made chemical compound? Sorry, my friend. While there are thousands of beneficial chemicals derived from plants and herbs, there is also a host of detrimental ones. Simply because it’s “natural” doesn’t make it better.
But both grass and salt are natural. I missed your point here.
Plus, have many “natural” treatments been tested to the same degree as modern medicines? Would they have lots of side effects if tested to the same degree?
Plus plus, there are lots of known side effects for some “natural” treatments.
The principle behind looking for drugs in plants (and bacteria and fungus and elsewhere) is that we are exploiting survival of the fittest.
Life is a constant biological warfare. In order for a fungus to survive, it makes an antibiotic to kill bacteria by inhibiting cell wall synthesis. We extract said chemical and use it to inhibit similar bacteria growing in our lungs. Penicillin is a fungal antibiotic.
Also, evolution states that all life has some similar building blocks (cell adhesion molecules, polymerases, protein synthesis machinery) due to protein homology. Purification of chemicals which plants or other organisms make to alter their (or their predators’) building blocks may have subtly different effects on us, which we can use to our advantage. Caffeine and nicotine are insecticides. Ergots (from which LSD is derived), digitalis, and belladonna (atropine) are toxic to animals. Many chemotherapeutics (taxol comes to mind) are naturally derived. The list goes on.
Also, to address the hijack – amongst the most toxic chemicals in our repertoire, many are naturally derived. Ricin and botulinum toxin are proteins. Also, side effects derive from the nature of our drugs to date – they are somewhat nonspecific, and have effects on not only the intended target, but other proteins as well. This is especially true with drugs which come from “natural” products. Digitalis (or the modern, more potent derivative digoxin) is an example – it has effects all over the brain that lead to visual field disturbances and mental changes. Nothing (except potency) says that a natural product will be any safer than a man-made chemical.
Protein chemists are working on computer simulations to build drugs from scratch – basically design drugs to inhibit specific enzymes with a minimum of cross-reaction. Hopefully these drugs will be the most specific, and therefore the safest.
I think the question has been pretty well answered, but I’d like to comment on the following:
I suppose if you consider dying pleasant, then I would agree. While it has been pointed out that nicotine is useful as an insecticide, like most insecticides it is equally harmful to humans. Here is a link to an MSDS for nicotine. I found one web site which claimed that the lethal dose for an adult human was 60mg, which is about in line with the LD50 for IV in mouse shown on the MSDS. Smokers, check your packs of cigarettes. What percentage of the lethal dose are you taking into your body per cigarette? Pretty neat, eh? OK, the LD50 for oral dosage in rats is much, much higher… but that doesn’t change the fact that its still poison.
Can I get you anything else? Cyanide gum? Arsenic drops?
{Not really on point, but I just skimmed the article the other day.)
The March/April issue of American Scientist has an article on the antibacterial effects of spices. The authors talk mostly about the use of spices in food, but IIRC mention the idea that plants have the relevant chemicals as a defence. They go on to discuss some proposed advantages of morning sickness.
Being something of an Old-Earth Creationist, I gotta say
God made plants like Cannabis, Peyote, psilocybin-containing mushrooms, ayahuasca and iboga for a reason.
I’ll leave it up to the rest of you to decide what that reason is.
As far as the other types of medicinal herbs, yes, I do subscribe to the belief that the “whole herb” is, in most cases, better than the isolated or synthesized active chemical. Often the medicanal benefit of the natural herb is the result of the action of the not only the “active” ingredient, but also of other chemicals in the plant that complement and enhance the chemical’s activity. Also, most whole herbs have natural chemical buffers that reduce side effects and potential toxic effects on the system. Also, many of these plants are used in combination with other plants, which have complementary enhancing/buffering effects.
Do you have any specific examples, evidence, and/or cites for these claims? I’m not denying or affirming the validity of your claims; I’m just curious.
We are more likely to find benifical chemicals in plants than by just randomly mixing chemicals for two reasons I can see:
The number of chemical reactions that take place to produce the chemicals is usually very large and take place in very controlled circumstances. Inside the plant there are any number of enzymes that catalyze the reactions and enable the plants to produce very complex chemicals that we could never produce in a beaker.
The chemicals produced by plants are already shown to be biologicaly active. The odds of randonmly mixing chemicals and getting a biologically active agent are very slim.
