this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
48 points (88.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35882 readers
1147 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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]

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sanguinepar@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If, over a long time period, that tree's particular characteristics lead to the species surviving, then it worked.

If it doesn't, then the species dies out.

There's no feedback, other than whether or not the species continues to exist.

[–] masterofn001@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How does it design a uni wing device to carry its seed to the earth?

[–] qprimed@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

as, for example an elm or maple? a random mutation may have provided a small spur to a seed. the spur changed the trajectory of the falling seed and may have allowed it to fall further from the parent plant and into a more ideal growing environment or simply further afield, which would allow it to slightly out-complete others plants.

if this change proved sucessful over longer periods of time, then the mutation would likely get more pronounced as long as the mutation continued to improve the plants fitness for its environment. fast forward 100,000 years later and environment pressure combined with inheritability and mutation have given you seeds with glide wings.

[–] masterofn001@lemmy.ca 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Makes sense. I realize the first part of the Q was simplistic. And I should have known (I did) the answer. It's the design I'm most perplexed by - not the why, the how. I guess this would be the simplest way to explain it.

Still, that birds, insects, and trees, all have wings... It'll never not be mind blowing.

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

You could look up some videos on "mutation design" which is a stochastic design method, which is basically used to design structures (like drone bodies) by using random mutations. It really shows how evolution works in real time.