this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

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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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (12 children)

How does a tree evolve a wing? - not to fly, but to propagate.

Parallel evolution makes sense to me in the animal kingdom, but a tree evolving winged vehicles for their seed is just mind blowing when I think about it.

  • berries and wings don't just randomly appear out of nowhere from year to year do they?

  • do we have any physical records of plants actually evolving these different methods like we do with bone structure of primates evolving?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (8 children)

If a tree mutates and it produces a seed that is slightly flatter than its competition, then that seed will fall farther and the tree will be slightly more likely to reproduce over its competition. Repeat this for several million generations over millions and millions of years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (7 children)

How long is a generation when trees can be several thousand years old?

[–] dandroid 5 points 4 months ago

Do your parents have to die for you to be the next generation? No. An organism and it's offspring are very frequently alive at the same time and apart of different generations. Once an organism has offspring, a new generation exists. So however old an is when it can reproduce, that is the length of a generation for that species. It has nothing to do with how long said organism can live.

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