Darwin’s Pharmacy - Review & Summary

Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere by Richard Doyle is an incredible, sweeping text exploring the interconnection of the psychedelic experience and the history of psychedelic research. He weaves together core insights people bring from the experience with the rhetoric used to describe them. Doyle shows how humans are partners in the evolution of psychedelic plants utilizing evolutionary theory of plant selection and the rhetorical devices used by humans to describe them.

This book is an essential text for psychonauts interested in understanding the nature of the psychedelic experience, our connection to plants, and the evolution of psychedelic substances.

Summary Review of Darwin’s Pharmacy

Author: Alex Criddle is an independent researcher, writer, and editor. He has a Masters in Philosophy, where his thesis was on the nature of healing in psychedelic experiences. He’s worked as a researcher at a clinic doing ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and as a psychedelic integration guide. His writing, psychedelic philosophy course, and contact information can be found at https://alexcriddle.com

Introduction – Glimpsing the Peacock Angel

Doyle opens the book by noting that the inability of humans to perceive just how interconnected the earth is threatens not only the ecosystem but also the self-definition of humanity itself as homo faber, an organism actively creating its environment. He suggests that faced with the evidence of climate change, we would expect an outburst of human agency, ordering the world to our specifications, yet in responses to climate change, the governments speak of adapting (this is important because this is a book that is, in part, about rhetoric according to Doyle).
To alter what we do and our relationships, we must re-engineer and re-imagine who we are. We are deeply implicated in the global ecosystem in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
Rhetoric plays an important part in shaping how we view things. For example, Robert Anton Wilson recognized that the word “reality” happens to be both a noun and singular, which subliminally programs us to view “reality” as one block-like entity, and every part is just another “room” within the skyscraper-like block. Meanwhile, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi describes a different type of rhetorical framework where we recognize that I am like a cell, a living cell of a global organism that is living. This creates a completely different set of ethical norms than the previous example.
Edgar Mitchell reports that while on the Apollo 14 mission he looked out the window and had a moment of realization that everything he had been taught was wrong. His understanding of the separate distinctness and the independence of cosmic bodies was shattered, and he had an irreversible understanding of the interdependence of the cosmos.
This awareness of the interconnection occurs in and with what scientist V. I. Vernadsky called the “noosphere”: the aware and conscious layer of the earth’s ecosystem and what feeds back onto our ecosystems as we become conscious of our interconnections with them.
Mitchell’s experience occurred on a spaceship, in outer space, requiring billions of dollars worth of technology. Meanwhile, users of plant compounds such as tryptamines and phenethylamines have a similar experience of the interconnection of the ecosystem.
This book seeks out the answers to a myriad of ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions provoked by psychedelic experiences within the context of the global ecological crisis such as what are these compounds and how do they produce experiences of interconnection? What do the states of mind they induce say about the nature of human minds? How should we respond to claims that they promote encounters with alternate and divine realities? And so on.
He makes a case even more relevant today than when the book was written in 2011 as an increasing number of companies try to “patent” psychedelic compounds that bioprospecting, the attempts of pharmaceuticals to claim ownership and control over the array of compounds produced in the global botanical compounds is not innovation, but an extraction of value from the commons.
Psychedelics reliably produce what he calls the “ecodelic” insight: the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut is involved in a densely interconnected ecosystem for which contemporary tactics of human identity are insufficient.
In the awe we forget ourselves and the ecodelic encounter renders the ego into a non sequitur. The self becomes tangibly a gift manifested by a much larger dissipative structure: the planet, the galaxy, the cosmos, Gaia.
Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, along with Aldous Huxley, note that the nature of the psychedelic experience is contingent upon its rhetorical framing.
Appropriately deployed psychedelics, when used with the care, craft, and respect they require, are tools for creatively thriving in a future that is modelled on ecosystemic rather than egoic practices.
Human brains run fundamentally on tropes and programs. Rhetorical practices can shape these tropes, and Doyle will argue that psychedelic compounds have already been vectors of technoscientific change because they are deeply implicated in the history of human problem-solving. Psychedelics are also possibly agents of sexual selection but absolutely stage evolution as a motif.

Chapter one will argue that despite their ineffability, trip reports persistently present rhetorical software or programs with which to replicate the psychedelic experience.
Chapters two and three look at the evidence that psychedelics have been used in a context selected as much by sexual selection than our ordinary understandings of natural selection as the struggle for autonomous survival.
Chapter four looks at how the “tuning” of attention reminds us that psychedelics can act as attention attractors. It also looks at the ways in which LSD caught the attention of Albert Hofmann and the rhetorical challenges he faced sharing his research.
Chapter five looks at the rhetorical practices of ayahuasca in both the seekers and practitioners. He finds a pedagogical practice oriented towards divining and learning to love infinity.
Chapter six links together the success of cannabis cultivators and their capacity to blur the borders between plant and human agency as a model for the emerging relationship between humans and biotechnology in general.
Chapter seven continues the emphasis on a pedagogy of plants and looks at the success of Ibogaine addiction therapy and what it can teach us about the habits of the pharmaceutical industry.
The epilogue, aptly titled “Darwin’s Dreams” suggests that we should respond to the ontological suggestions of ayahuasca and other ecodelics with more care than we’ve given indigenous peoples and ecosystems.

Chapter 1 – The Flowers of Perception: Trip Reports, Stigmergy, and the Nth Personal Plural

If we are going to respond ethically to the presence of psychedelic technologies in our cultures, then we need to evaluate what they are ontologically. He suggests the molecular definition does not give any real apprehension of what they are. The evidence lies in the only real data we have: first-person testimonies of experiences, which are the “readout” produced by human consciousness and a particular compound.
The continual disavowal of language in language becomes a site for analysis. It’s a rhetorical move made in response to the psychedelic experience.
Richard then describes a curious feature occurring in most 2C-I reports (a phenethylamine invented by Alexander Shulgin). Most describe “the mistake”. Not “a mistake” but “the mistake”. The mistake of licking the envelope containing the substance, or extra flakes that landed on the table. The mistake of taking an extra milligram of a substance. Richard clarifies that it is not because psychonauts are careless (they invest in expensive drug scales and many other tools for more precision) but that psychedelics are a particularly delicate affair.
Trips are thus first protocols or scripts for the better or worse ingestion of psychedelic substances. They are efforts enabling repeatability. Trip reports can be both quantitative descriptions of the dosage and delivery, but also incredibly detailed descriptions of the context and mindset of the psychonaut.
He describes trip reports as fundamentally rendering algorithms, clusters of recipes to be tried out, sampled, and remixed by psychonauts, a rhetorical treatment of distributed consciousness in serial terms. Their function resides less in their “meaning” than in their capacity to be repeated and help generate patterns of response.
Henry Michaux’s writing regarding mescaline does so in and about a style that would transmit psychedelic experiences rather than simply report on it. And so, Doyle wants to suggest that when looking closely at Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, to read trip reports for what they can teach us about the psychedelic experience is reading them as if they are symptoms of and subsequent frames for psychedelic states rather than failed signs of the ineffable.
Huxley’s work is rhetoric that helps make sensory the articulation of ecodelic experiences, as early mescaline experiences were characterized as an “osmosis of reality and the imagination”, an overlay difficult to differentiate and full of subtle implications. So, with Huxley, we must begin with flowers, something that renders this overlapping subtlety.
Flowers are fundamentally rhetorical devices, capturing the attention of pollinators to enable reproduction. And flowers themselves have been a seductive site for the description of rhetoric itself in the past. Flowers, or patterns of flowers, could be arranged in a way to communicate love not representable in speech or writing, offering another possibility for language.
Huxley’s description and method for organizing his difficult-to-describe trip appears via flowers. Doyle parses out just how Huxley’s extensive description and usage of flowers is meaningful in evincing the psychedelic experience.
Psychedelics for many represent a scientific enhancement of human perception akin to the microscope. The early scientific data gathered by this tool suggests that the separation between the self and cosmos is an illusion.
After addressing the question of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”, Doyle then tackles Amit Goswami’s immanent interpretation of quantum mechanics and Schrodinger’s famous cat, before noting that the difficult situation that Huxley finds himself in is that he can only narrate the radically interconnected cosmos provisionally and heuristically. There is the difficulty of observing the conditions of observation which leads to the further difficulty of observing the conditions of observation of observation and so on in an infinite regress. This problem can be characterized as the problem of rhetorical superposition: a position wherein meaning itself becomes virtual, distributed over the entirety of an ecosystem and locatable only through a query of an entire system.
Huxley noted that evolutionary constraints would likely select for a reduced awareness of “mind” and “mind-at-large”. Parallel to Goswami’s ideas, Huxley noted that our language and modes of description are inadequate to the Universe and even to the Earth itself. The mind-at-large is a thoroughly distributed transcendent consciousness. Huxley’s Mind-at-large is linked to his analogy of the “reducing valve” which compresses the information of psychedelic experience in a way that lets the narrator avoid taking account of the qualitative changes allowing them to write about a character called “I”. Huxley will return again and again to the imagery of a flower as a way to think and talk about these domains. His flowers would enable the replication of mescaline experiences by turning the attention of readers to other patterns.

Chapter 2 – Rhetorical Mycelium

Doyle hypothesizes that ecodelics entered human evolution via their role as adjuncts to eloquence. They cause us to speak out about the ineffable until we exhaust the capacities of our language to silence. They take language to its limit and encourage innovation.
Psychonauts report that a compound can sometimes lose its “magic” and subsequent sessions don’t capture the intensity or transformative power of the initial experience. Doyle suggests that one possibility is that the self is heavily “programmed” by the first experience and is not as open to the vicissitudes of the plant or compound later on. The first trip becomes a script.
Henry Munn wrote, parroting Heraclitus, that “It is not I who speak . . . it is the logos.” This led Munn to the concept of ecstatic signification, of being a conduit for language. Ecstatic suggests an ontological bifurcation, “being beside oneself” where language takes on agency and “words leap to mind, one after another”. The shaman doesn’t govern the speech and song but is astonished by its fluent arrival. Intoxication increases rather than retards fluency.
Walter Benjamin, utilizing Hashish, recognized the importance of silence in language and Doyle reminds the reader of the silence of the participants of the mysteries of Eleusis.
Maria Sabina noted it isn’t language or even silence that is an adjunct to mushrooms. The mushrooms themselves use language and eloquence itself in the book that was shown to her. “The Book appears and I learn new words.” The mushrooms work with rhythms of language. They are transformers, they speak through the shaman’s lips.
Doyle cites Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Henri Michaux, Aldous Huxley, Stanley Krippner, and others who all link the use of psychedelics with the desire to speak unto silence, to write, and to explore rhetorical practices.
Stanley Krippener, a psychologist who has studied language and psychedelics, has suggested that psychedelics are adjuncts to “non-verbal training”. Language evolves and develops by nonverbal means in interactions with other living systems and the repetitions proper to language iterate on the basis of prior repetitions. So the coordinated movements necessary to survival are coupled to the neurological patterns and linked to an animate environment. Ecodelics, by blocking the throttling embrace of the self, enable a resonance between the mind and nature not usually available to the attention.
Doyle calls the experience of ecodelic interconnection “the transhuman interpellation.” In shifting back and forth between the nonhuman perspectives of macro and micro we are hailed by the tiniest of details and the largest of overarching structures as reminders that we are always already linked to everything in the biosphere.

Chapter 3 – Rhetorical Adjuncts and the Evolution of Rhetoric

Timothy Leary, in seeking to narrate his first trip, begins to sample and remix works and writing from previous thinkers. The psychedelic ineffability seemed to induce this need in him. Interestingly, Leary seemed to be an evolutionary psychologist as his trip remixes included Darwin and focused on the evolution of man. And Leary’s sampling of Darwin reminds us that Darwin was a psychonaut, he was fascinated by the coevolutionary interconnectedness of ecosystems.
Leary and other writers agree that it is this ability of montages within psychedelic insights that create conditions for a mystical insight. It is an interruption of attention, a turning of attention, or a noisy silencing that enables transformation. An example is the standing within and standing without oneself in quick oscillation is necessary for self-reference and is a characteristic feature of many ecodelic experiences.
In the previous chapter, Doyle showed that ecodelics are implicated in variable cadences of eloquence, and he suggests that we look at the evolution of oscillatory behaviour in mate pairing and group bonding to understand why truth might flicker.
Doyle then goes on to tease out the intricacies of Darwin’s dance with understanding natural and sexual selections. In doing so he points out that Darwin was following the trace of the effects of attention on the biosphere and how attention was the unconscious, yet dominant factor in much of selection.
Noise is an attractor for the emergence of order as it grabs the attention and modulates it.
In the neurobiology of a birdsong, the addition of a jitter enables production of a variable song. And this can occur endogenously or exogenously.
Architect Christopher Alexander noted that when we are in the midst of projects and focused, we see the world differently, this ability to see everything differently according to Huxley emerges only when the smaller scale structure of the ego ceases to be the primary attention attractor and other larger scale forms come into relief. This aligns with recent work done by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn on the role of the self and ego in the psychedelic state. Psychedelics are pattern breakers.
Doyle then cites research showing animals seek out inebriates as well as humans do. He then, via researchers such as Olivia Judson, Lynn Margulis, and Dorion Sagan that sex itself has emerged in response to the planetary telos of increasing the dissipation of information. Contemporary thermodynamics taught that evolution systemically wants to dissipate greater and greater amounts of available energy and by converting energy into information, new energy gradients are explicated, increasing entropy production. And while some posit a 4th animal drive, seeking intoxication, Doyle notes that sometimes the sexually selective vector searches for eloquence in intoxication.
Sexual selection would appear to be a content provider for psychedelic experience, as if their evolutionary use were allegorized or imprinted by some of its content as well as its form.

Chapter 4 – LSDNA

Here Doyle wants to map molecular biology’s rhetorical and conceptual evolution and its debt to forms of agency such as laughter, terror, and ecstasy. These are crucial to a conceptual evolution in the life sciences and to understanding DNA.
This chapter will trace how shamanic rhetorical practices are at the heart of molecular biology’s transformation and the genetic medicine associated with it.
Users of LSD such as Leary, Osmond, Alpert, and Grof all looked at set and setting in psychedelic states and as a part of that took DNA and used it to frame and articulate ecodelic sessions as programmable but not controllable events. Theirs was a pragmatic rather than semantic relation to the “information” of DNA. At this time, DNA was a sort of psychedelic archetype.
Doyle describes Albert Hofmann’s first experimentation with LSD, noting that usual experimental protocols demand everything be involved except for the self, yet in Hofmann’s initial experiments, it was precisely only the self and its responses that were the test subject.
LSD was both the object of scientific inquiry and the medium for the communication of the results of that inquiry.
Within the Harvard Psychedelic Circle, psychedelic manuals were catalysts for transcendent experiences. The manual isn’t centred on the communication of meaning, even if it does that. Instead, the text is seen as a how-to manual for managing and transforming different contexts with the help of exotic but debugged techniques.

Chapter 5 – Hyperbolic: Divining Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca can induce anxious, or even terrifying trips, and unlike the brown acid of Woodstock, it isn’t the agent producing the distress. The problem is the self, which has to give up its attachments to abide by the parallel consciousness ayahuasca induces. This consciousness is presented as a multitude of entities and forms.
Doyle then compares the McKenna’s description of a report of what the Jivaro could do with ayahuasca to Darwin’s opening in On the Origin of Species. Both Darwin and the McKenna’s attempt to turn the mind towards infinity (Darwin’s the external infinity of diagramming the origins and the McKenna’s towards the hyperbolic infinite “within”).
The imagining of objects and places creates mental space that is constrained in many similar ways as real space is constrained. The McKennas aren’t asking individuals to imagine an object or a place, but invite individuals to participate in an infinite regress—another shamanic dimension is invoked.
The prospect of an information interconnectivity struck the McKenna brothers as surreal in the context of a rainforest far from an “information technology” of the usually understood kind. But they were surrounded by a massive system of informational connectedness—databases about self-organizing strategies that work. Rain forests are the most effective producers of entropy on the planet through the interconnection of massive biodiversity.
The compression of information through the breakdown in symmetry that enables one to become resonant with evolution while mapping the hyperbolic space of human subjectivity is the telos of psychedelics.
Applying the McKenna’s model to ecodelic perception results in human consciousness acting or modeling a transcendental expression of an immanent universe. Human perception acts transcendental as long as it is rendered as hierarchically distinct from the universe. But this transcendental expression is an expression of an immanent ecology where the distinction of self and cosmos emerge from a nested hierarchy as recursive thought becomes hyperbolic in a mathematical and rhetorical sense.
The Psychedelic Anthropic Principle suggests that the universe is tuned towards the emergence of a consciousness that would behold the cosmos and itself in awe.
True Hallucinations oscillate between true and falsity on a spectrum. There’s a gradient on the hallucination-perception spectrum.
Ronald Siegal’s research has suggested there is experiential learning in the psychedelic experience. The psychonauts learn to manage the information of the experience without ascribing an ontology to it. They deploy rhetorical devices that blur the distinction between hallucination and perception. The experienced psychonaut can enter the realm of the “as-if-true.”

Chapter 6 – The Transgenic Involution

This chapter opens with Doyle surveying the landscape and progress of the underground cannabis industry—how THC levels have multiplied since the 1980s and how there has been a growing compilation of ogling images of the green buds and flowers of cannabis. Individuals describe some of the pictures as almost taking you inside the bud of the plant. These entries into the flower (recall Huxley from earlier) resonate with the individuals. This teaches us that for users and growers of cannabis, appearance matters.
Cannabis has formed a human-plant alliance and selection favours those plants that excel at dissolving boundaries.
Cannabis biotechnologists must learn to read the signs of quality from male plants. One must learn to “get high” from low-potency marijuana.
The would-be grower must learn to become less inclined towards the bong and more sensitive to their plants. They must be capable of being affected by even trace amounts of THC.
Even when stoned, the grower is taught by the plant. Even beginners can learn to select a good plant for breeding from this.

Chapter 7 – From Zero to One: Metaprogramming Noise, with Special Reference to Plant Intelligence

Many of Doyle’s journeys with ayahuasca have concerned the fact that plant intelligence runs the planet. Human consciousness is just a way for plants to move plant and bacterial genes around. Humans have forgotten this and think of ourselves to be the centre of the planetary telos.
There is no center planetary telos. Instead, it is a distributed emergence of complexity and its dissolution (cosmos).
To an organism who wants to survive and leave behind progeny, it helps to have a sense of one’s environment as a system to understand the combinations and re-combinations of input and output. This kind of systemic thinking requires recursive thinking and requires narratives to orient each subsequent recursion.
Doyle then demonstrates this looping recursion through his own journeys with ayahuasca, followed by the example of John Lilly’s life and research, and finally through the work of Schrodinger, Buddhist and Hindu conceptions of enlightenment, and tying it all back to Terence McKenna’s work.

Publisher Summary of Darwin’s Pharmacy

“Are humans unwitting partners in evolution with psychedelic plants? Darwin’s Pharmacy shows they are by weaving the evolutionary theory of sexual selection and the study of rhetoric together with the science and literature of psychedelic drugs. Long suppressed as components of the human tool kit, psychedelic plants can be usefully modeled as “eloquence adjuncts” that intensify a crucial component of sexual selection in humans: discourse.

Psychedelic plants seduce us to interact with them, building an ongoing interdependence: rhetoric as evolutionary mechanism. In doing so, they engage our awareness of the noosphere, or thinking stratum of the earth. The realization that the human organism is part of an interconnected ecosystem is an apprehension of immanence that could ultimately benefit the planet and its inhabitants.”