FilterHN

The myopia required to claim that "The puzzle of how tobacco plants produce nicotine, however, has been around since the late 1820s" is egregious considering we've evidence attesting to tobacco use dating back twelve thousand years.

Does the author genuinely believe that no one wondered in the ten thousand years between our earliest example of tobacco use and 1820?

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bicx

1 hour ago

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Well, the author specifically mentions the puzzle of how it produces nicotine. Nicotine was first identified and isolated as a chemical in 1828, based on a quick google. So, no one was wondering about nicotine production before then because they didn’t know what it was.

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pixl97

17 minutes ago

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>Nicotine was originally isolated from the tobacco plant in 1828 by chemists Wilhelm Heinrich Posselt and Karl Ludwig Reimann from Germany, who believed it was a poison.[210][211] Its chemical empirical formula was described by Melsens in 1843,[212] its structure was discovered by Adolf Pinner and Richard Wolffenstein in 1893

30 seconds on Wikipedia would have given you context of when the separation of nicotine occurred. Kind of hard to guess how tobacco plants make nicotine when you don't know what it is.

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tracerbulletx

1 hour ago

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How exactly would they ask that question 10,000 years ago if they didn't know what molecules were, much less nicotine?

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galleywest200

1 hour ago

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A curious question. Those same people also bred brassica oleraceae into so many different crops so they had to have SOME idea of how plants worked. Maybe they did not attribute it to molecules but growing conditions or locations, or something.

Either way somebody somewhere wondered about this before 1820.

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furyofantares

42 minutes ago

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"They wondered how it worked" is different than "they wondered how it produced nicotine", what with "nicotine" being the name of the molecule.

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someguyiguess

26 minutes ago

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That’s true. Only your pedantic interpretation is correct.

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