Plant: joke's on you, getting you to propagate my species has been a wildly successful reproductive strategy

Human: sure, but it means you'll go down with us as we destroy ourselves

Plant: …

Plant: shit

Fruits, and by extension peppers, evolved to be eaten. Peppers are the fruit of the pepper plant, and generally speaking, fruits act as an enticement for animals to eat them and thus distribute their seeds.

It's just that hot peppers specifically appear to have evolved a strategy to dissuade mammals from eating them, since the chemical that causes them to be hot primarily affects mammals, but not birds. It's actually not an uncommon strategy, many fruits are distasteful or even poisonous to certain animals, but are perfectly edible to other animals in a way that suggests it is specifically beneficial to be eaten by some but not by others.

I've heard the argument that the evolution of our ability to enjoy such things benefits both that pungent plant as well as us. By eating such things, we propagate them better. But the kind of insects and animals that would otherwise eat them wouldn't assist propagation. So the plants evolved to both repel the disadvantageous eaters and attract the advantageous eater by the same method.

I kinda think that falls apart with horseradish though. Afaik, humans don't spread anything directly with that. We can cultivate it, which helps the plant, but that's not the same action as digging up garlic, eating some, and spreading the cloves, or the seeds from peppers. That puts a hole in this specific set of plants with that idea.

Have you ever done butt stuff after too many chilies the night before?

Spicy dick was not a fun time, I had to put it in a glass of milk for a while.

Garlic and onions are toxic to a lot of mammals.

Humans superpower is the ability to eat all this poisonous stuff.

Birds laugh at your spicy peppers. My parrots LOVE to eat jalapenos and raw red Thai peppers. In the wild they eat them and spread/fertilize the seeds, so they don't taste the spicyness.

As a result they are bred in mass and dominate domestic agriculture. Long term strategy who knows but short term things are working out pretty ok I thinks.

Humans are fucking terrifying.

Alien 1: so tell me about this new species you've found

Alien 2: well it's in a kind of backwater planet of a backwater galaxy so they haven't made contact with any other sentient species. Only one sentient species on the planet. Couple of almost-sentient though, but one has achieved dominance.

Alien 1: not uncommon. Tell me about them.

Alien 2: they're terrifying.

Alien 1: really?

Alien 2: they breed and expand like a virus, taking over every geographic area they enter.

Alien 1: they have large litters of children then?

Alien 2: no, relatively few.

Alien 1: how do they take over--

Alien 2: they. kill. everything.

Alien 1: they wha--

Alien 2: they were responsible for multiple mass extinctions before they developed writing.

Alien 1: Oh my. How do they hunt?

Alien 2: They chase their prey.

Alien 1: Well, yes, but how?

Alien 2: They chase their prey until it drops from exhaustion. They do not stop.

Alien 1: Well that's frightening.

Alien 2: Oh and they're pack hunters.

Alien 1: That just got worse.

Alien 2: They managed to quickly discover all the poisonous plants and prey in their area.

Alien 1: Ah, so they're intelli--

Alien 2: And they consumed them en masse.

Alien 1: ...

Alien 2: for fun.

Alien 1: we should probably destroy their planet.

Alien 2: in self-defense.

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan is about this. It follows four plants- Tulips, Apples, Cannabis and Potatoes through the changes that they have been through as they trick us into domesticating them/we adjust their genetics to suit us. Spoiler: the chapter on Potatoes is largely about RoundUp Ready GMOs and how we are ruining the world so that McDonald's can have long, beautiful french fries from one specific, blight prone variety and is really depressing (but still interesting!).

If you think about, we "humans" are about as strange as creatures can get. We breathe oxygen, which is a corrosive gas. Metal exposed to oxygen starts to rust. Some common foods we eat like apples contain arsenic and other poisonous substances. By the time we're adults, we have more foreign microbes living in our bodies than human cells. We're pretty scary as a species all right. To other alien life out there, we're probably going to seem like extremely mutant freaks.