JRE #2467 - Michael Pollan

The James Webb Space Telescope found galaxies that are 'too old', potentially challenging the current 13.7 billion-year age of the universe.

JWST has found massive galaxies earlier than expected, challenging models of GALAXY FORMATION, but most astrophysicists still maintain the ~13.8 billion year age based on Cosmic Microwave Background data.

The smell of a freshly mown lawn is a 'chemical scream' released by plants to attract predatory insects to attack their herbivores.

FML (freshly mown lawn) odors are 'Green Leaf Volatiles' (GLVs) that serve as distress signals to warn other plants and attract beneficial predators, but 'scream' is an anthropomorphic metaphor for a chemical signaling process.

Plants can see vines which change their shape to mimic the plants they are climbing.

Boquila trifoliolata really does mimic the leaf shape, size, and color of whatever plant it climbs, sometimes even without touching it, and that mimicry is genuinely documented by researchers. But the idea that the vine can 'see' its host to do this is one contested hypothesis, not an accepted explanation, and a study testing the vision idea has been criticized by other scientists for weak design and unreplicated results. The mechanism behind the mimicry is still an open question in botany.

Caffeine served as a key driver of the Enlightenment by replacing alcohol as the primary beverage, allowing for sharper focus.

This is Pollan's argument, and the underlying shift is real. Europeans did move from drinking ale for hydration to coffee and tea, and coffee houses became places where people argued rather than nodded off. Calling caffeine a key driver of the Enlightenment is his interpretation of that timing, not something historians have established as cause and effect.

MDMA and psilocybin therapist expedited approval was recently stalled by a removal from a White House priority list.

This is grounded in something real: in October 2025, the White House and HHS blocked FDA Commissioner Marty Makary's plan to give Compass Pathways' psilocybin treatment an expedited 'National Priority Voucher,' pulling it from the list right before recipients were announced, as first reported by STAT News in February 2026. But that specific block was about psilocybin. MDMA therapy's setback traces to a different event, the FDA's August 2024 rejection of Lykos Therapeutics's MDMA application, so folding MDMA into the same 'removed from a White House list' story overstates what actually happened to it.

The 'Stoned Ape Hypothesis' suggests that psilocybin mushrooms triggered the rapid expansion of the human brain.

The Stoned Ape idea is a real hypothesis Terence McKenna proposed in 1992, but mainstream anthropologists and biologists have largely rejected it for lacking evidence and for misusing the research it leans on. There's no direct archaeological or genetic evidence tying psilocybin use to the brain's rapid growth, and critics note that psychedelic-using societies didn't turn out the way the theory predicts. It's a popular fringe idea in psychedelic culture, not an accepted explanation for human brain evolution.

Freshwater fish like trout appear in high mountain lakes that have never been stocked.

High mountain lakes really can hold trout with no official stocking record on file, but research on this, including a 2025 study combining historical records with eDNA testing, points to unrecorded or illegal stocking as the explanation, not fish appearing on their own. Anglers dumping bait fish or hand carrying trout into remote lakes, sometimes called bucket biology, is a documented practice going back decades. So the fish are real, but treating their presence as unexplained skips over the mundane and well documented reason they're usually there.