The 'true' beginning
And then there was life...
And then, there was Planet Earth. In the Big Bang theory, you learn about prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms, followed by the geological cycles of water, soil, and air. You study climate and gases before learning which species of flora and fauna existed in that specific era.
However, I didn’t learn any of that until college. Because of my religious upbringing, I was taught that G-d created Earth in parts and pieces over seven days; it was simply ‘magic’. There was light and dark, then water and land, no science involved. Then came the plants, the animals, and finally, mankind. All these complex organisms just appeared. It was the ultimate answer to the ‘chicken and the egg’ joke: the chicken came first, obviously.
Hot peppers appeared 50 million years ago, having evolved from a ‘bland’ tasting berry. I’ll get back to the “berry” in a minute. To some, 50 million years sounds like a bubbe-meise¹; if you are reading religious texts, such a timeline does not exist. According to the Big Bang theory, however, life and organisms are hundreds of millions of years old.
The difficulty in understanding life that old is that many religious texts only count time with the start of their religion; before that, time was relative. What isn’t taught in religious schools is the commentary that G-d created and destroyed the earth multiple times. But what does “destroyed” mean? Did G-d destroy the entire planet, or just certain features? I discovered this deeper commentary as a young adult, and it changed my perspective. I realized a tree could potentially be millions of years old. They don’t teach you about Lillith in school, only Eve.
Back to the berry. I don’t actually believe the berry was bland. You see, plants, humans and all living organisms have an innate drive rooted in Darwinian theory to survive and multiply. They achieve this by spreading their seeds or through reproduction, whether alone or with a partner. This is how they stay alive: by creating more of themselves. Even if the individual dies, their genetic essence lives on.
And if you think about it, for a species to survive, it must cover as much ground as possible. If a pepper were as spicy then as we know it today, what bee or bird in its right mind would die over a berry? None. Therefore, certain creatures lack specific sensory abilities, such as chemesthesis, the sensation of the burning and retronasal olfaction, the ability to process aromas, allowing one to differentiate between the flavor of a jalapeno versus a habanero beyond just the spicy sensation. Birds were the primary seed dispersers that would eat these berries and spread the seeds across the land, ensuring the plant can evolve and thrive.
The botanist’s books claim the berry was bland. I think the berry was similar to the Sichuan Pepper, in that it was very small and produced a chemesthesis sensation. Sichuan is not part of the Capsicum genus, but it contains Sanshools, which activate the same receptors as capsaicin to create that numbing, chemesthesis feeling.
Evolutional biology suggests that humans didn’t exist 50 million years ago, but I wonder if every living thing on Earth has a bioactive compound that innervates and creates different reactions in humans. If whatever or whoever created life designed each plant to have actives that cause an effect in us – it’s so cool.
Then there is nurture, evolving through adaptation. For example, the hot pepper began as a berry, but as the world heated up, it adapted to new temperatures by hardening its skin against increased UV exposure. This shift ultimately protected its antioxidants from denaturing. While its physical ‘nurture’ changed, its ‘nature’ remained the same; its active compounds did not alter. This raises the question of coevolution: was everything in this dimension created with the inherent drive to thrive, live and heal itself?
Note
Yiddish term for made up nonsense