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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by masterofn001@lemmy.ca to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

How does a tree (or any plant, really), know to evolve to produce a delicious fruit or a poison berry, a seed inside an impenetrable shell, or invent a type of flying machine, in order to reproduce? (Each of these examples exists in my backyard)

How do they receive feedback about their evolutionary experiments? How do they know it worked/failed. [10]

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[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 30 points 1 month ago

In addition to what other people said, I'll focus on the delicious fruits.

A lot of wild fruits are awful when raw. Crab apples are a good example - small, tough, excessively tart. But then you get humans picking the least awful of those fruits, and spreading their seeds (sometimes without a thought, sometimes on purpose), you're effectively selecting the best-tasting ones. And across multiple generations, the fruit goes from barely edible to passable to okay-ish to good-tasting.

In other words, plenty tasty fruits out there are not the result of trees "trying" to propagate themselves better. They're the result of weird monkeys doing artificial selection across millenniums. Or even through the centuries, as this Renaissance painting shows:

Check the bottom right - those are watermelons. Granted, watermelons aren't from trees, but the reasoning is the same - in just three centuries or so watermelons went from "90% styrofoam with some good bits" to big balls of juice. Why? Human intervention.

[-] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 8 points 1 month ago

And thank goodness! I love watermelon.

[-] phantomc137@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

old age water melons looks like the devil fruit

[-] phantomc137@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

you mean aliens 😯 no way , let me get my tin foile hat , alien intervention equals humanity ? coincidence ? hmmmmm

this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
48 points (88.7% liked)

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