Submitted by HazeThere t3_yhz5vu in explainlikeimfive
Like how does fruit know to be sweet to persuade us to eat it and shit the seeds somewhere else? How do chilies know that only birds are immune to spice of capsaicin so that they will eat it and take the seeds further when they fly somewhere else? Did they plan this or was it an accident?
"Just an accident" is maybe not giving credit to the forces involved here.
The plant itself isn't intelligent, but the process that makes it kind of is (in the sense that there is meaningful information encoded in which individuals reproduce or not). It isn't a coincidence that a chili pepper produces capsaicin any more than it's a coincidence that a water droplet takes a spherical shape: both are obeying mathematical laws, just not with any "intent" behind them.
There are physical laws that dictate why a water droplet takes the shape it does; there is *nothing* in the universe that says "there should be capsaicin". If the capsaicin mutation hadn't happened the entire ecosystem would have been just fine without it. There are, for all practical purposes, infinitely more traits that have never and will never be expressed than ones that we've ever seen.
> there is nothing in the universe that says "there should be capsaicin".
There's nothing in the Universe that says "there should be capsaicin" specifically. But conditional on animals having particular receptors, there is something that says "plants with it can outcompete plants that don't".
Yes, evolution has (significant) random elements in terms of where you start on the fitness landscape and in terms of non-biological factors (e.g. "oh shit a meteor just hit the Earth) that can sometimes intervene. But evolution is tightly intertwined with game theory, and it isn't a coincidence that game-theoretic strategies show up all the time in evolutionary biology.
"Organisms, broadly speaking, will eat and reproduce" is just as iron-clad a law of our Universe as "objects will roll downhill" is. Maybe more so, since it's implied by abstract mathematical law and not even by the particular quirks of actual physics.
> There are, for all practical purposes, infinitely more traits that have never and will never be expressed than ones that we've ever seen.
This is true to some extent, but the frequency of convergent evolution shows us that some patterns really are just super useful. Wings have evolved independently in birds, insects, mammals, and even plants if you count the little fins on a maple leaf. That's not a coincidence.
In fact, universal darwinism asks us to believe that a universe with spherical water droplets is more fit/stable than one without, and that's why it persists long enough for us to exist in it.
Yeah I get it now. It’s basically just survival of the fittest (or sweetest)?
Natural selection
The sweet fruits got eaten, and the seeds spread, causing those plants to thrive, and reproduce, and so on
the ones that were bitter didn't get eaten, and therefore couldn't spread and thrive and eventually died out.
This makes a lot of sense, but how does that explain lemons and limes?
It's the same, they just ended up adapting differently.
The basic premise still applies, one plant mutated to be sweet/sour/bitter/spicy etc It's neighbour plant mutated to be less so
Animals/humans liked one version more, and liked the other version less, so those plants get eaten, and the seeds get spread
In some cases, humans specifically liked certain tastes so we manually selected and bred plants with specific mutations and variations to get the flavours we wanted
Although some people out there on the fringe of what we call knowledge have speculted about possible consciousnesss in plants, it's generally thought that plants don't know anything, at least not in the way we think about what it means to know something.
Evolution has only one rule: whoever dies with the most grandchildren wins. Plants don't seem to have "known" to be sweet or spicy or anything else. It just happened that the sweetest plants got spread the most, and (mostly) passed the things that made them so sweet on to their children. Do this enough times, and the whole species starts to taste sweeter. It's not exactly an accident -there are systems by which it works, and those systems can be used to predict how things are likely to go in the future- but as far as we can tell there is no mind behind it. It just worked, and so it kept on working.
Accident.
You're projecting intention onto what is an evolutionary process, which is a sequence of adaptations adopted over time, without intention behind it, i.e., by accident (i.e., because a thing happened to have a trait that helped it survive and reproduce).
They don't know. But plants that just so happened to produce sweeter fruit, (or peppers with more capsaicin) ended up having their seeds spread more, and so the next generation had a greater tendency to do that.
It was accidental evolution. Millions of different fruits evolved with different tastes, but some happened to be sweet.
The sweet ones were able to outcompete the non-sweet fruits because more animals ate the sweet ones, spreading their seeds.
This gave them a huge advantage in reproduction and eventually they became the more dominant fruit tree, and the fact that animals enjoyed them meant they would not die out.
tdscanuck t1_iuggcpd wrote
They dont know. They didn't plan any of it. It's just an accident.
That basically how evolution works...plants & animals keep randomly trying things (DNA mutations)...some of them work to make the critter more successful, most don't work at all and the critter dies.
Every once in a while, a mutation is useful enough that the critter gets to reproduce more, creating more critters with that mutation. Eventually, the traits that don't work die out and the ones that do work well (enough) spread.