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In any science story, we will more than likely find a special category of 'first post' comment: the 'I'm smarter than teh science-talking-guys!" first post. These posts always feature a blindingly obvious 'criticism' of the science at hand, usually made by someone with no formal training in the field, that any competent scientist will take into account, but many halfway competent science writers will fail to mention. Thus, to the uninformed, the first poster appears insightful. "Wow! Good call, how could those dumb scientists miss that?!?" Uh, yeah, they didn't. I'm just curious, but what is your background in biology and chemistry? Are you educated on this subject, or are you just one of those people who likes to think they know better than those boneheaded scientist-types?

Just in case I haven't made it crystal clear: you have not thought up anything the scientists did not take into account. I guarantee, you have not come up with a cogent criticism of this experiment, and you are not smarter than the fellows performing this experiment. You are not insightful, and your karma whoring question does not add anything of value to the discussion.

I may be mistaken, but I think it is generally considered that spicy or picante does not have a flavor receptor and that the picante experience can be attributed to chemicals that cause irritation in our mouths.

Yeah; you probably are mistaken. ;-) For a long time, there has been a bit of a medical mystery about how hot peppers produce a sensation that feels like major heat damage, but medical tests can't detect any actual tissue damage of any sort. This was answered a few years ago by some researchers who determined that the capsaicin chemical that does the job targets specifically the nerve endings that detect heat, and tricks them into sending a false signal to the brain saying "I'm being burned!"

An interesting aspect to this was verification that capsaicin does target specifically mammalian heat sensors, and doesn't work with birds. Anyone who has pet birds is familiar with this. Seed mixtures intended for birds such as parrots usually contain hot peppers, which the birds like. I like to grow my own hot peppers in pots that I bring in during the winter. I have to protect them from our pet conure and cockatiels, because they'll land and the plants and devastate them. When I decide to pick the ripe ones, the conure especially is right there demanding samples of the harvest, which she devours whole.

Further research is needed on the topic, but the hypothesis is that hot peppers evolved their "hot" chemical explicitly to distinguish between mammals and birds. Pepper seeds have a thin, leathery shell which doesn't survive the long, slow digestive system of most mammals. But birds can't afford to carry food around for long; they have a short, powerful digestive system that extracts just the easily-digested stuff and dumps the rest after only a few hours, because it would take more energy to transport it than it contains. The leathery shells of pepper seeds do survive a bird's digestive process. So the hypothesis is that peppers are specifically encouraging birds as seed-transport agents, and discouraging mammals that would digest the seeds.

There's some sort of biological irony in the fact that hot peppers have been spread from their origin (South America) to the rest of the world by a mammal (us). Of course, we can easily do something that's difficult for other mammals: We can dilute the hot pepper enough that it's just a minor (or not so minor) flavor mixed with other flavors, and not overpowering as it is if you eat the pepper alone.

In any case, to be on topic, we should note that the hotness of hot peppers isn't really a "flavor". It's more a case of our heat sensors being tricked by a chemical produced by plants that are trying to prevent us from eating their fruit and digesting their seeds.