breckenridgeback t1_iuggmjc wrote
Reply to comment by tdscanuck in ELI5: How do plants know that they will be eaten and therefore their seeds will be spread and regrow? by HazeThere
"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.
tdscanuck t1_iuggzo2 wrote
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.
breckenridgeback t1_iugi5r5 wrote
> 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.
dude_chillin_park t1_iuh3hg0 wrote
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.
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