791
Hummingbird plant
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
791 points (98.9% liked)
Mildly Interesting
27970 readers
146 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.