Comment by tirant
1 day ago
That’s also my thought. The seem to be inside some type of evolutionary gray area or dead-end, where mutations in the edibility axis do not seem to matter much for the survival of the specifies. So we end up getting species of all extremes: extremely poisonous, highly valuable for coursing, trippy, non-trippy, mildly poisonous, etc.
Metastatic cancer where our organs and cells grow every direction forever until resources expire is extremely counterproductive and doesn’t matter for the survival of our species because it usually occurs after reproductive age and the reproduction happened. Perpetuating the flawed genes in the next generation.
Its the same with mushrooms, the difference being that not only do the spores exist in high numbers, a mushroom getting eaten does nothing to the mycelium that spawns the mushroom