Archive: https://archive.today/F6OMw From the post: >>Chiltepins grew without anyone planting them. Small, lipstick-red berries tucked into the understory of tropical and subtropical America, they were part of a working relationship between a plant and birds that had nothing to do with human appetite. Chiltepins are ancient, and may have evolved their key ingredient of heat over 40 million years ago. Capsaicin, the compound that makes chili peppers hot is an evolutionary filter designed to punish mammals and reward birds. Mammals feel it as pain because mammal digestion destroys seeds. Birds don't have the receptor that detects it, so they eat the fruit, fly off, and deposit the seeds far from the plant from which they ate. The plant needed birds, and birds didn't mind the heat, because to them there was no heat to mind.