As others have said, vitamin C synthesis is something most mammals could do. Apes lost it because there’s not much use for the ability when your diet contains so much fruit. Adaptations with no use get dropped by evolution pretty quickly deterministic way. Once it’s gone, it’s hard to get it back.
Evolution has no problem with small selection effects—even tiny ones work quite nicely once a mutation gets past the early small numbers stage (which admittedly makes mutations less likely to stick.)
Evolution in humans would historically have been quite slow because humans historically had all the wrong traits—long lifetime, slow breeding, small numbers. And the most difficult of traits to evolve is novel chemistry—the bugs that do this best have short lifetimes, fast breeding and enormous numbers—and all that makes a big difference.
There are easy things to evolve. One is to take an existing gene, copy it, and insert it back in roughly the same area. This kind of duplication can easily lead to larger quantities of a chemical being made. This could lead to more of a chemical being made, or more of a chemical receptor. Or it could lead to the chemical being received or created in a new area. It can also be the first step in a process where the second copy becomes slightly different, and then gets used in slightly different places. It can rebalance all sorts of things.
It is the case that you can try chemicals which evolution never would. But so what? They can only influence your brain by plugging into receptors which evolution created to receive something which it can make. A receptor in the brain which your body can’t trigger would most definitely not be something that evolution would keep. I don’t think you can do much that couldn’t equally be done by evolution’s duplicate and modify technique. Most of the things you’re trying have probably already been tried, as duplications are easy mutations to have.
Overall, adding chemicals is operating at the wrong scale. It’s similar to the idea of pouring liquid nitrogen into your PC to make it go faster. You may succeed. But compared to Intel’s contribution it’s not really a breakthrough. The big answers lie elsewhere. And it’s not without its risks.
As others have said, vitamin C synthesis is something most mammals could do. Apes lost it because there’s not much use for the ability when your diet contains so much fruit. Adaptations with no use get dropped by evolution pretty quickly deterministic way. Once it’s gone, it’s hard to get it back.
Evolution has no problem with small selection effects—even tiny ones work quite nicely once a mutation gets past the early small numbers stage (which admittedly makes mutations less likely to stick.)
Evolution in humans would historically have been quite slow because humans historically had all the wrong traits—long lifetime, slow breeding, small numbers. And the most difficult of traits to evolve is novel chemistry—the bugs that do this best have short lifetimes, fast breeding and enormous numbers—and all that makes a big difference.
There are easy things to evolve. One is to take an existing gene, copy it, and insert it back in roughly the same area. This kind of duplication can easily lead to larger quantities of a chemical being made. This could lead to more of a chemical being made, or more of a chemical receptor. Or it could lead to the chemical being received or created in a new area. It can also be the first step in a process where the second copy becomes slightly different, and then gets used in slightly different places. It can rebalance all sorts of things.
It is the case that you can try chemicals which evolution never would. But so what? They can only influence your brain by plugging into receptors which evolution created to receive something which it can make. A receptor in the brain which your body can’t trigger would most definitely not be something that evolution would keep. I don’t think you can do much that couldn’t equally be done by evolution’s duplicate and modify technique. Most of the things you’re trying have probably already been tried, as duplications are easy mutations to have.
Overall, adding chemicals is operating at the wrong scale. It’s similar to the idea of pouring liquid nitrogen into your PC to make it go faster. You may succeed. But compared to Intel’s contribution it’s not really a breakthrough. The big answers lie elsewhere. And it’s not without its risks.