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Hummingbird plant
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
883 points (98.8% liked)
Mildly Interesting
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The most amazing thing about this is that the plant has never seen a hummingbird.
Think about it. The plant has no eyes nor the ability to change its own leaves. What must have happened? Maybe an ancestor had leaves that randomly, vaguely resembled a bird? Perhaps the descendants that happened to look more like hummingbirds were then pollinated more often than the rest?
Nature is so fucking crazy and I love it.
Bee orchid
Wow he's actually a good artist
Bee porn. What a filthy filthy flower
It also resorted to masturbation for survival
Same
Uno reverse
This is species of spider that has evolved to look like an ant. They do this so they can infiltrate the ant's nests and get a free meal by just eating the ants food.
The thing is the ants blind so there was no point looking the same as they wouldn't have been able to tell anyway.
The spiders must feel very smug about it tho.
Hehe, they'll never know
It should, however, emit some pheromone, as the ants use that to identify each other..
Hmm, getting a free meal by looking like the staff...
Can't they feel the shape?
You should probably google Boquila trifoliolata.
But yes, it's impressive if it never met anything that looks like a hummingbird.
Holy shit, thanks for sharing! I think it's impressive in either case.
For anyone else, here's an article I found about it: https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2022/11/30/23473062/plant-mimicry-boquila-trifoliolata
It's just a random coincidence. Nothing more, nothing less.
Looks way too much like natural selection than a coincidence.
I think he's pointing out the fundamental misunderstanding a lot of people have about natural selection: nothing chooses to evolve; there is no active participation. Whether the plant could see hummingbirds or not is irrelevant because it can't change it's genetics and mutate on a whim anyways.
Natural selection is when genetic mutations happen by chance, and sometimes those mutations just happen to benefit the survival and reproduction of that individual, so the genetics mutation gets passed on. It's just a fluke though. It's a fluke that the mutation occurred and and even bigger fluke that it lead to reproductive benefit.
So the evolution of any kind of survival mechanism is, at its core, a coincidence.
Mutations happen by chance but the result is not random, because natural selection is not random.
Update: Regarding your first part: A lot of people misunderstand the role randomness plays. Evolution is not random and not a coincidence but a consequence of any system that makes imperfect replicas in an environment that rewards (or punishes) certain traits.
How did the system come about? You say this as if the system were intentionally designed. But it is not: the natural order which creates evolutionary pressure is itself the culmination of many coincidences.
I don't think it was designed but that's nothing evolution is concerned about. Evolution is (as the name implies) about evolving systems and doesn't really say anything about how the first replicating "system" came to be because that's abiogenesis and not evolution.
Yes, that's all true, but their use of "random coincidence" seems to entirely dismiss the selective pressure that created this plant. Selective pressure is not "a random coincidence". It's a long series of random coincidences all leading up to the organism we see now.
It was a very dismissive, useless comment.
Opinion. Literature says this is still being debated.